HVAC systems are a convenient means of maintaining a comfortable temperature in your home, but they don’t always heat or cool evenly. You don’t spend time in every room of your home, so heating and cooling these areas constantly wastes energy. A zoning system can reduce energy costs and improve your family’s comfort and health, room-to-room.
A zoning system divides your home into two or more distinct climate zones – possibly something as simple as upstairs and downstairs – each served by its own thermostat or sensor connected to a single control panel. This panel operates dampers within your heating and cooling system’s ductwork. The thermostat in each room or area reads the temperature of its zone and opens or closes the dampers if the thermostat’s settings require them to do so. This allows you, for example, to maintain one temperature in frequently used rooms and another temperature in rooms that aren’t used as often or at all. A zoning system also accounts for climate differences in separate zones, such as a finished basement that requires more heating in the winter or upstairs bedrooms that need more cooling in the summer.
Zoning systems can also help extend your HVAC system’s service life, because they reduce the equipment’s workload. A home using a zoning system doesn’t require its HVAC system to heat or cool the entire house all of the time, so the components aren’t overworked and may last longer.
Before you buy, though, make sure a zoning system will benefit your home and your family. Zoned temperature control may be a good idea if one or more of these conditions exist:
- Your family prefers different temperatures in different bedrooms, or temperatures vary in each room at different times of the day due to location, number of windows, or size of the room.
- Your home has two or more levels.
- Your home has large open areas, such as a loft or a room with vaulted ceilings.
- You have additional rooms, such as a finished basement or attic, or an addition off the back of the house or garage.
- You have rooms with large expanses of glass or several windows, or rooms that are built over a concrete slab.
For more information about zoning systems for your Indianapolis area home, contact Mowery Heating, Cooling and Plumbing.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Brownsburg, Indiana and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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