If your home has areas where temperatures vary throughout the day or night, upgrading to a zoning system will help you stay more comfortable. Zoning systems use individual thermostats and air-duct dampers to regulate where the conditioned air goes. These systems let you customize your conditioning system so it’s more adaptable to different climate conditions within the home, as well as the varying comfort preferences of occupants.
Besides benefiting from increased comfort, a zoning system helps lower your energy bills, especially if your home has:
- A second floor and/or finished basement
- Areas you don’t use continually
- High ceiling plates or vaulted ceilings in some of the areas
- Large expanses of windows
- A sprawling home;
- Occupants whose ages or health conditions require more precise temperature control.
Instead of heating or cooling the entire house at one time, the zoning system allows you to select the temperature for each zone. A second floor, for example, is likely to be warmer year-round. In the summer, you can keep this area cooler without having to turn the thermostat down for the entire home. Or if you have an always chilly finished basement, you can heat it in the winter without overheating the rest of the house.
The dampers inside the ductworks have motors that open and close them based on the thermostat settings. The thermostats are wired to a central unit that controls the dampers. How many zones you need varies based on the size of your home and your living habits. If you use your bedroom area just for sleeping, you could condition it only when you occupy those rooms.
When you’re upgrading to a zoning system, it helps to sketch the floorplan of your home and assess how you use each space. If you have a finished basement that you occupy infrequently, it makes sense to put that space in its own zone. When you anticipate using that space, you can change the temperature at the thermostat, and the heating or cooling system will condition it.
If you would like more information about upgrading to a zoning system, please contact us at Ernst Heating & Cooling. We’ve provided quality HVAC services for the Greenville, Highland and Troy, Illinois areas since 1951.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Hamel, Alton, Glen Carbon, Highland, Greenville, and Troy, Illinois and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about zoning systems and other HVAC topics, visit our blog.Â