Life in your home moves from room to room throughout the day, but no matter how you use your home, traditional heating and cooling systems manage the temperature of the whole house at once. Zoning systems tailor home temperature control to the parts of your home you’re actually spending time in, leading to significant energy savings .
Some homeowners intuitively grasp that by limiting their heating and cooling to certain rooms, they can reduce their energy spending. However, without a zoning system installed, it’s hard to control. If you close off the vents to an unused guest room, for example, you’ll actually introduce more unconditioned air into your system through that room’s return vents, and the air pressure in the rest of your ductwork will become unbalanced.
A zoning system installs specially designed dampers inside your ductwork to better route and manage airflow throughout your home. Different zones in your house are defined by the dampers, which can limit or increase airflow through ducts to those spaces. A different thermostat controls each area, so when you need more heating or cooling in that zone, the dampers will let the appropriate amount of air through.
One common application for home zoning systems is two-story houses, where the upper level receives more conditioned air during the night while the household is asleep. During the day, the lower-story living areas can be kept at a comfortable temperature without spending energy dollars on upstairs bedrooms.
If you’re interested in more granular control over how your home is heated and cooled, you can also look into ductless mini splits, which have a separate small unit to control individual rooms or sets of rooms. While they offer a little more flexibility – for example, cresting a “one-room zone” in a home addition or garage – they may be more expensive than home zoning systems.
To learn more about home comfort and energy savings in your North Carolina home, call up your home comfort specialists at Jackson & Sons Heating & Air Conditioning !
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Eastern North Carolina (including Wayne, Johnston, Greene, Lenoir, and Duplin Counties) about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about zoning systems and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide .
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