At Home In The Woods

[RadarTech]

zoning is best way to adjust.

I have a single floor living area... Zoning is expensive to do...
Is there any other way?

thanks,
J

 

[dcyrilc]

zoning is best way to adjust.

What is zoning???

Our houses heat drives me crazy. The bedrooms are at the far end of the house from the furnace, but even with turning the thermostat down to 63 the bedrooms will get to 70+ with the doors closed.:confused2:

 

[RadarTech]

What is zoning???

Our houses heat drives me crazy. The bedrooms are at the far end of the house from the furnace, but even with turning the thermostat down to 63 the bedrooms will get to 70+ with the doors closed.:confused2:

I found this:

Zoning HVAC System Video ? 5min.com

Basically you put a thermostat in each room you are concerned with.
Then a central controller opens a duct to the room that is cold to provide heat and closes a duct to the room or rooms that don't need heat..


J

 

[dcyrilc]

I found this:

Zoning HVAC System Video ? 5min.com

Basically you put a thermostat in each room you are concerned with.
Then a central controller opens a duct to the room that is cold to provide heat and closes a duct to the room or rooms that don't need heat..


J

That does sound expensive. I'll settle for turning down the thermostat and throwing the comforter off my side of the bed.:laughing:

 

[eepete]

Zoning is where you take the heat pump/furnace and instead of having heat one huge area, you break the area into pieces called zones. Each zone has it's own thermostat. Each zone has the ductwork such that a mechanical damper can be opened or shut to so that the zone gets air. This also works with radiant floor systems, I'm just using air systems to discuss this. A zone can be a room or a group of rooms.

There is extra cost at the time the system goes in because the ductwork has to be sized right. The dampers cost money. There is a controller board that can take 2 to 4 thermostats and then operate the dampers and run the heat pump/furnace. Finally, typically the furnace has a variable speed fan. If it's a heat pump, it has dual speed compressors. This lets is operate a small zone efficiently, but still be able to heat the larger overall area if need be. Part of designing a zone system is taking into account all the different room volumes and heat pump/furnace capacity.

Zoning is expensive and difficult to retro fit, the cost and difficultly being hard to guess up front. It depends on what sort of HVAC unit you have, access to ducts, if the system had manual dampers to balance it out (easier to add dampers), and if wires for the damper control are easy to run.

I don't do HVAC for a living, but I'm in house #3 and had to steer my HVAC guy pretty hard to get it right. HVAC guys, feel free to jump in if I'm missing something.

Pete

EDIT: What Radar Tech said: he used much less words. Cyril, you could still use manual dampers to balance the system a bit.

 

[RadarTech]

Ya know... you could put these in place a few at a time...
Suncourt ZC110 10-Inch Diameter Normally Closed Electronic HVAC Air Du
and then build a switch bank to control them in preparation of going to a automated zone control system.

 

[Obed]

Obed,
how do you go about balancing the air flow?
we have that problem in our house..

2 bedrooms get down right hot and a third stays rather cool.

I agree with how you have managed this difficult contractor.

J

RadarTech,
We have manual dampers in the ducts that feed each register. The worker used a temperature meter to record the temp of each room. He then used an air flow meter to measure the cfm of air coming out of each register. He then adjusted the dampers to provide flow rates at each damper in order to increase or decrease the temperature of each room relative to the rest of the house.
Obed

 

[radioman]

That does sound expensive. I'll settle for turning down the thermostat and throwing the comforter off my side of the bed.:laughing:

I don't mean to hijack obed thread . I have been quoted 3,800 to have one installed in my house last monday. Right now I have some rooms closed off or open a little and other rooms wide open manually. upstairs is mostly closed, downstairs opened except room where woodstove is. Its better then it was when I first moved in. I am still doing research on what I want for my home.

 

[Obed]

Yesterday's conversation with the H&A guy didn't go well at all. I didn't even get to talk about the filters in the ceiling returns. I'll call him again tomorrow. Due to the intimidation tactics the guy used on the phone yesterday, I'm now less willing to offer to install the filter grills myself. I'm now considering asking him to put in filter grills in the returns like he should have done. I'll be very surprised if he agrees to do that. If he won't install the filter grills, I have the option withholding his final payment and using that money to hire someone else to install the filter grills. Installing the filter grills will require reworking the framing around the two returns and replacing some of the ductwork that connects to the grills.

 

[Obed]

RadarTech,
We have manual dampers in the ducts that feed each register. The worker used a temperature meter to record the temp of each room. He then used an air flow meter to measure the cfm of air coming out of each register. He then adjusted the dampers to provide flow rates at each damper in order to increase or decrease the temperature of each room relative to the rest of the house.
Obed

RadarTech,
The topic fits in nicely to where our project is. Our house now has between 2 and 3 degrees difference between one end of the house and the other. The people we've talked to won't really say how many degrees difference between the rooms is acceptable. We can tell just by walking in the rooms that the bedrooms are a little cooler than the kitchen, LV, and DR that are on the other end of the house.

After talking to a GC friend of my and two HVAC companies, I am learning that balancing the HVAC system in a house can be tricky and that 2 or 3 degrees temperature variance may not be that big of a deal. My GC friend said that to really do it right takes hours. The damper in one of the bedrooms is wide open so we can't increase flow to the bedrooms. The GC said we should be able to tweak our house ourselves by closing the dampers in the warm parts of the house ever so slightly, wait a few hours, take temp measurements, tweak the dampers some more, take temp measurements, etc. until we get the temps just right. We might do that.

Obed