Whole House Zoning – Taking Total Control Over Your Home Air Conditioning System

Whole house zoning has been around for decades but is utilized in less than one percent of American homes. But what is it? Whole house HVAC zoning is basically a series of electronic remote control dampers attached to your air conditioning and heating system to deliver specific temperatures to specific areas of your home when you need it – not just one temperature for the whole floor. Many families complain about “hot spots” in particular areas of their home where the temperature is too hot or too cold depending on the season. But with multiple thermostats the temperature can be dialed in from room to room just like turning a light on or off. After all, we don’t click a light switch in the living room and expect it to illuminate the kitchen. That just wouldn’t make sense. And yet we continue to build and buy homes with this same wasteful concept in mind.

The versatility of whole house zoning is vast. With multiple thermostats on a first or second or even third floor temperatures can be adjusted to suit the comfort for all in the home. For example, not only could the bedrooms and play areas for your children be set at 78 degrees while the master suite area could be a cool 72 degrees, but also the kitchen, dining room and utility could hover at 75 degrees. In fact, many homes these days have mother-in-law suites at one end of the home. And with a properly installed whole house zoning system the mother-in-law suite could require constant heat at 79 degrees before cycling the system back to cooling to meet the temperatures mentioned above. Now that is total control of your home comfort system!

Although a thermostat in every room is certainly possible, most homes that have whole house zoning installed typically utilize three to five zones per house or floor. The ductwork for the system needs to be relocated to a particular zone or electronic damper with its own thermostat to condition that particular area of the home. The more zones involved the more the initial cost of the whole house zoning installation. And usually one thermostat per floor is the “master” thermostat while the others are “slaves”. But the basic function of each zone is to open up the electronic damper in the attic, basement or crawl space and deliver enough warm or cool air to satisfy that particular thermostat, shut the damper, then continue to do the same thing for the other zones until each thermostat is satisfied.

Finally, since every room in our homes have at least one light switch because that makes perfect sense, wouldn’t it also make perfect sense that the appliance in our home that consumes the greatest amount of energy – our air conditioning and heating system – have a way to control the temperature where we want it, when we want it, no matter what room we are in? With whole house zoning we can take total control over our home comfort while maintaining a tighter grip over our utility consumption.