Creating different climate zones in your home is lovely, but some things have to be in place for this to happen. You may be blessed with a smart thermostat, but it can’t create and manage different zones in your home all by itself. Here’s how to arrange climate zones in your house.
Install or Retrofit Climate Zones
There are a bunch of ways to set up climate zones. You can use battery-operated vents and sensors that check the temperature in your rooms. This information gets relayed to a hub that can be installed in your utility closet. This hub works with your thermostat and the thermostat’s app to manage the temperature in your rooms throughout the day. This is a great option for people who don’t want to or can’t quite afford to rearrange their ductwork.
Another way to zone your home is to install dampers right into the ductwork. These dampers have their own remote control motors and open and close to control how much air gets to different rooms and areas in your home. You’ll need to install more than one thermostat to control this setup.
Your smart thermostats work with what’s called multi-stage HVAC systems. In old-fashioned systems, the same amount of heating and cooling is sent everywhere in your house. In the multi-stage setup, the first stage lets the system work at a lower speed. This brings quiet, gentle, comfortable heating or cooling. The second stage speeds up when the weather turns very hot or cold. Multi-stage HVAC works really well with a zoned system. It’s possible for every room in your house to be its own zone, but what’s usual is for several rooms, such as the bedrooms, to be zoned together. For example, you might want to lower the temperature of your bedrooms when it’s time to go to bed (this assumes everyone goes to bed around the same time) and gradually raise the temperature when it’s time to get up.
Using the Thermostat
If your home is zoned through using dampers, the thermostats work with your smartphone. This controls the dampers and thus the temperatures of these zones.
Don’t fret if you have only one thermostat. Its own app can help you choose which sensors work in different rooms at different times. It’s even able to tell when someone is in a certain room through a “follow me” prompt. This helps ramp up the heating or the cooling while turning off or turning down heating and cooling in rooms that are empty. A smart thermostat can even communicate with the app on your phone when you and your phone are not home, and adjust the temperatures in all of your climate zones.
When you create climate zones in your home, your thermostat has a primary role in how and when they work. This makes living that much more comfortable and also saves energy and money. If you live in Phoenix, AZ or Tucson, AZ and need HVAC zoning services, make your first call to Alaskan AC.