QUESTION FROM MC Blanco

I live in a condo unit in a building that was constructed in 2005. We have baseboard heat that is powered by natural gas and controlled by a wall thermostat. For some reason that makes no sense to me, a tiny baseboard register was installed in my extremely small laundry room. To make a long story short, I now have a converted that room to a sleeping area, and the heat is suffocating me! Please tell me there is a way I can turn off the heat register just in that room, without too much drama. Crossing my fingers! Thank you for this service!!!

ANSWER FROM HOME-WIZARD

Dear MC Blanco:

It's sort of difficult to answer specifically without seeing the room, etc. But here are some thoughts . . . If your laundry room has an external wall (i.e., one of the walls is part of the outside of your house), then this room may have needed the length of baseboard radiator that it has because there are water pipes for the laundry, and the heat is necessary to ensure that the pipes don't freeze in the wintertime. But if your situation is that the room isn't just warm, but way too hot, then one thing you might consider doing is removing the "fins" from the hot water pipe that goes through your baseboard heating radiators. By removing the fins, you will significantly reduce the heat transfer from the water pipe. Less heat transfer means less heat coming into the room. However, you might want to try this a little at a time. Because if you remove too many fins, and you find that now the room doesn't heat up enough, replacing the fins back on the pipe can be very difficult (it could mean having to cut the pipe out and replacing it with a finned pipe). So you just want to be sure to not take off any more fins than you need to.

Hope this is helpful.
Home-Wizard.com