How a Zoning System Can Optimize Your Heating and Cooling

When you are heating or cooling a larger home, using a zoning system can be quite helpful in both optimizing your comfort levels and reducing your energy usage at the same time. Let’s start by taking a look at zoning systems.

Understanding Zones

In a typical home, there are the kitchen, living area, maybe a separate dining room, possibly a den or second living area, bedrooms, guest rooms, etc. Each home is uniquely arranged and your use of the home is equally unique to your lifestyle. Now, think about how much time you spend in each room of your home. Some rooms probably see you a lot: your kitchen, bedroom, a living area, maybe an office. Other rooms may not see you much at all: the spare bedroom for example.

If you were to split your home into zones, the most used rooms of your home would be zone 1. For most homes this would be the living area, including the kitchen and living room. Depending on the layout of your home, this zone would include more or less space. Zone 2 would then include those secondary areas that you use, but not at the same time as the zone 1 spaces; for example, your bedroom. Zone 3 would be those rooms that you tend to not use very often.

Zone Heating and Cooling

When you think about how often you use the rooms of your home, it should become clear that you are using more energy to heat or cool your entire home than is necessary. Why do you need your bedroom to be comfortable when you are relaxing in your living room or testing a new recipe in your kitchen? That’s wasted energy. And, likewise, when you are asleep, unless you tend to sleepwalk, you shouldn’t need your kitchen and living room to be kept at a comfortable temperature because you are spending that time in your bedroom.

The idea then, is to have an HVAC system installed that is capable of heating or cooling in multiple zones. This means you will have separate thermostats in the various zones in your home so that you can set them independent of each other. This way you can save money on heating or cooling based on your use of space, rather than by trying to live in an uncomfortably warm or cool space.

Zoning Example

Let’s take a look at how one example of zone heating would work. Let’s assume for this example that you have 3 zones: zone 1 is your living room, kitchen, and dining room, zone 2 is your bedroom, and zone 3 is your guest room.

When you wake up in the morning, your bedroom, zone 2, is warm and cozy. The automatic thermostat has already kicked the heat on higher in zone 1, though, so when you get dressed and go downstairs, you remain comfortable even as the outside temperatures hover around the freezing mark. Zone 2 will now begin to cool down, saving you energy even as you spend your time comfortable in your kitchen and living room. At the end of the day, you go upstairs for bed and your thermostat has already kicked zone 2 back up to a comfortable temperature, while zone 1 now cools down for the night, saving you money on heating. Zone 3, in the meantime, remained cool all day because you had no need to use that space.

There is no need to use excess energy on heating and cooling in Minneapolis when you can utilize a zone system to save both energy and money.