When dealing with warming and cooling your home, you have probably noticed that there are places in your home that are often warmer or cooler than other areas. There can be a number of reasons for this. For example, we all know that warm air rises. Rooms on upper floors, as a result, tend to get much warmer than the basement. Likewise, a living room with a huge vaulted ceiling tends to lose a lot of warm air to the top of the room, resulting in a cold living room. Rooms with large windows that face south tend to get very warm, even in the room.

For many homeowners, there is a desire to even out the total temperature of the home and that is where things like system zoning for the home come into play.

The Zoning System – What is it?

System zoning involves having multiple thermostats in the house, in key areas, which are all wired to a central control panel. The thermostats will read the zone that they are in, and they will open or close the dampers to the room depending on if the temperature is at the right level. For larger homes with inconsistent temperature levels throughout the rooms, having a zoning system in place can be highly efficient.

Benefits of Home Zoning Systems

One of the biggest benefits with a zoning system is that you are not wasting energy. Your bedroom will stay the temperature you want it to, all the time, and your unused spare room will not be filled with wasted heat that no one is benefiting from. This naturally results in savings on your heating bill. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the overall savings for a home that uses a zoning system can be as much as 30 per cent per bill.

Since heating and energy account for 40 percent of the total costs associated with utilities in the home, which amounts to a lot of money saved for a home.

Drawback

The biggest drawback is the initial cost of putting in the system. For anyone who is not replacing a furnace or building a new house, it can be a large cost to put in system zoning. That being said, there are systems that you can purchase, which will be retrofitted into the existing ductwork of your home. No heavy motors are involved and you do not need to replace or alter the existing ductwork in the house.

How Many Zones Do You Need in Your Home?

You may be wondering how many zones you should have in your home. The number of zones will impact the way the system is set up. For example, in a two-zone system, the zones will be equal in size and each ductwork in the zones will handle 70 per cent of the total cubic feet per minute of air that is coming out of your central air system.

If you have a three-zone system, each ductwork in the zone will handle 50 percent of the air. If you want to put in a four-zone system, it is going to be a lot of work as all the ducts need to be enlarged by one inch to have a static pressure relief damper in place.