If you have central heating, you know two things are impossible: 1) Getting every person in your home to agree on the same thermostat setting and 2) Every room in your home adhering to a uniform temperature set on your thermostat. If you have thermostat wars breaking out between family members and certain rooms in your home feel too cold or too hot no matter what you do, then it may be time for you to get in the ZONE! No this isn’t an Autozone blog (sorry, bad dad joke). We’re talking Zoned Heating and how it can ultimately save you money on energy bills and squash family thermostat squabbles once and for all.
How Does Zoned Heating Work?
Without getting too technical, zoned heating and central heating do have one thing in common: They both use a central furnace to heat the air in your home. The difference with both systems is how the air is circulated throughout your home.
Central Heating: Every room in your home is receiving warm or cold air, controlled by one thermostat. With this system, either the thermostat is on and all of the rooms are receiving warm air, or or the thermostat is off and none of the rooms are receiving warm air.
Zoned Heating: While still using a central furnace, every supply vent has motorized dampers that can open or close. Dampers are essentially valves that control the flow of warm or cold air throughout your home. Multiple dampers are then connected together to create a “zone”. So when your furnace is running, only the rooms with supply vents whose dampers are open will receive warm air. Each zoned area’s temperature can then be controlled by separate thermostats in different rooms.
Benefits of Zoned Heating
- Save Money and Energy
With a zoned heating system, different rooms in your home can be set to different temperatures throughout the day depending on what rooms are currently in use. For instance, if you’re going to sleep in your upstairs bedroom, you can set the thermostat to a lower temperature in the rooms downstairs that are unoccupied at night. With multiple zones in your home, you’re not using unnecessary energy to keep every room at the same temperature all the time, which can save homeowners up to 30% on their energy bills overall (according to the US Department of Energy).
- Eliminate Hot and Cold Spots
When you have central heating, you typically have one thermostat in one room representing the temperature of the entire home. In reality, that thermostat only senses and seeks to control the temperature of the area surrounding it. So if you have central heating in a two-story home, you’ve probably noticed your upstairs is always warmer than your downstairs due to heat rising. You also may notice that certain rooms with more windows always feel colder. Whatever the case may be, most homes have hot and cold spots, but with zoned heating, different areas are controlled by separate thermostats so you can adapt the temperature in your home accordingly.
- Adapt to Different Temperature Preferences
We all know people who tend to always be cold, wearing jackets in 75 degree weather . Or, on the flip-side, people who are always hot, wearing shorts around the house during a snowstorm. If your home is like ours, you have both types of people living within the same walls, meaning it’s impossible to please everyone with the same thermostat setting. With zoned heating, different people in different zoned areas are able to directly control the thermostat of the room they’re currently using, resulting in higher comfort for everyone overall.
Summary:
If you want to save up to 30% on energy bills, eliminate hot and cold spots, and have less family disputes about temperature, it might be time to get in the zone and reach out to Boss Services in Coloma and St. Joseph, MI about zoned heating solutions for your home. The only thing zoned heating won’t help you with? Compromising when the always-hot and always-cold couple sleep in the same room…you’re on your own with that one!
