How Baseboard Booster™ started
99 Innovations' co-founder Chris had a problem with his son’s bedroom on the second floor of his home. The room struggled to get up to temperature in the frigid Connecticut winters.
The problem was his son’s bedroom was at the end of the hot water baseboard heating system zone in the northwest corner of the house. The other bedrooms in this zone would reach temperature quicker and the thermostat would shut down before his son’s room was warm. Chris tried to find solutions to the problem but kept hitting dead ends.
The problem was his son’s bedroom was at the end of the hot water baseboard heating system zone in the northwest corner of the house. The other bedrooms in this zone would reach temperature quicker and the thermostat would shut down before his son’s room was warm. Chris tried to find solutions to the problem but kept hitting dead ends.
He tried to fuss with the vents on the baseboards. He tried keeping his son’s room door opened and keeping his son’s room door closed. But nothing helped much. He tried turning up the heat but turning it up enough to warm his son’s room left the other rooms sweltering and burning through energy. He also didn’t want to use a space heater in his son’s room due to their fire safety aspect. He tried to find a product to fix the problem but found nothing that improved baseboard heating. There were tons of register boosters for HVAC systems, but the current market overlooked homes with baseboard heating.
With nothing on the market to solve the problem, Chris rolled up his sleeves and solved it himself. A big part of the problem was the baseboard heating itself. A hot water baseboard dribbles out heat. This heat has to rise to the ceiling before circulating via convection through the room. Chris realized that facilitating the airflow through the baseboard as well as aid the room’s convection airflow, would help better warm the room. It would pull additional heat out of the heating system significantly increasing the efficiency of the baseboard and reduce the time it took to heat the bedroom.
With nothing on the market to solve the problem, Chris rolled up his sleeves and solved it himself. A big part of the problem was the baseboard heating itself. A hot water baseboard dribbles out heat. This heat has to rise to the ceiling before circulating via convection through the room. Chris realized that facilitating the airflow through the baseboard as well as aid the room’s convection airflow, would help better warm the room. It would pull additional heat out of the heating system significantly increasing the efficiency of the baseboard and reduce the time it took to heat the bedroom.
The solution: Baseboard Booster™
After a few months of experimenting, prototyping, and testing, Chris created the Baseboard Booster™. It worked like a charm! Using a heat sensor, a microcontroller, and an array of fans to orchestrate the heat flow, it warmed up his son’s bedroom twice as fast and reached overall higher temperatures, ending the cold nights for his son.
