Hardwood Floor Cleaning in Bardwell, TX
Closing the vents in the rooms nobody uses saves less money than people think and does more to those floors than anybody expects.
It is a sensible-sounding idea and half the households in Bardwell have tried it. Two spare bedrooms nobody sleeps in, a formal room used at Christmas, so shut the registers and stop paying to condition them.
Heating and cooling engineers have written a great deal about why this does not save what people think it saves. The part nobody writes about is what it does to a wood floor in the closed room, and that part is straightforward physics.
The Room Stops Matching the House
With no conditioned air entering, that room drifts toward whatever the outside is doing. In August it runs hot and, once the air conditioning is no longer removing water from it, humid. In January it runs cold. Meanwhile the rest of the house is being held in a narrow band year round. So you now have two climates inside one building, and a wood floor that runs continuously between them.
What the Floor Does About It
Wood moves with moisture, so the boards in the closed room swell in a humid summer while the boards ten feet away in the hallway do not. Over several seasons that shows up as a difference in seam width at the doorway, occasionally as a board that has cupped in the closed room, and in bad cases as a floor that has pressed itself tight against the baseboard on one side of a threshold and not the other.
The Condensation Problem
A closed room in a Texas August can drop below the dew point of the humid air leaking into it, particularly along an outside wall. That is how a closed guest room ends up with a musty smell and a dark patch of floor near the exterior corner. This is the version of the problem that is genuinely damaging, because it is liquid water in contact with wood, not a matter of a few thousandths of an inch of seasonal movement.
The Reasonable Middle
Leave the registers open and let the room sit at the same conditions as the rest of the house. If the goal is to spend less, the money is in insulation, sealing, and the thermostat setting for the whole house, none of which asks a floor to live in two climates at once. Closing a door is fine. Closing the vent is where it goes wrong.
Not sure whether your floor needs cleaning or refinishing? There are three tests you can run yourself in about a minute, and they will tell you which one you are dealing with before anyone quotes you.
Hardwood problems we handle in Bardwell
Open the vents first, give it two weeks, then decide what the floor needs. Bardwell books on 214-838-7852 or the site's scheduler, with $50 off the first cleaning.
Areas we cover around Bardwell
Neighborhoods: O.T. Bardwell, Bardwell Estates, Gaines Estates, Highview Park, Mott Park, Waxahachie Creek Park, Love Park, Lake Bardwell shoreline
Zip codes: 75101
Hardwood questions from Bardwell homeowners
There is already a musty smell in the spare room. Where do we start?
Open the vents, run the system, and get air moving in there for a couple of weeks before deciding anything about the floor. A great deal of what people think is a floor problem resolves once the room joins the rest of the house.
The boards near the outside wall have gone dark. Is that recoverable?
Depends how far it went. Discoloration in the finish comes off. If the wood itself has darkened, that is a stain inside the board and no cleaning reaches it, and putting it right means work that a refinisher does and we do not.
Do you clean rooms that are barely used?
Usually as part of the house, and they cost very little extra since the setup is the same. A room that has sat closed generally has bonded dust on it that is harder to remove than the soil in the busy rooms, which surprises people.
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Schedule your Bardwell hardwood floor cleaning
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