Zoning systems are meant to provide comfortable temperatures throughout your home, helping to eliminate hot-spots and chills that can occur with traditional systems. By dividing your home into zones, each with its own thermostat, zoning can deliver just the right amount of heat or A/C to suit the differing needs of areas with varied heating and cooling loads. However, that system must be well-designed to provide those benefits, so if you’re considering a zoning system for your home, it’s essential to choose an experienced HVAC contractor for the job.
Effective zoning system design requires a skillful assessment of the heating and cooling loads of each room in your home. Rooms with higher loads, such as those with exterior walls or lots of windows, should be in one zone, and those with lower requirements, such as interior rooms that are not affected by the elements, should be in another. Finished basements may need their own zones for consistent home comfort, as might converted attic spaces.
While a well-designed system can do away with uncomfortable temperature differences from one area of your home to another, a poorly-designed system cannot. Grouping rooms with widely-varied heating and cooling loads together in one zone will have much the same affect as the one thermostat system, leaving some rooms colder than others in winter or creating hot-spots in the home during the summer cooling season.
For instance, placing a room with large windows and southern exposure in the same zone as an interior room that is insulated from the elements will defeat the purpose of installing a zoning system, as one thermostat cannot keep both comfortable. If the thermostat for that zone is placed in the interior room, heating and cooling will be adjusted to suit its lighter heating and cooling load, leaving the exterior room colder in winter and warmer in summer.
If you are a Southern California homeowner, feel free to contact Around the Clock Air Conditioning and Heating for expert advice on zoning systems. We’ve been keeping homes in the greater Los Angeles and North Hollywood areas comfortable since 1967.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Los Angeles, North Hollywood and surrounding areas 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.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock