If you find yourself constantly adjusting the thermostat in your home during the winter because some rooms are much colder than others, you may want to consider installing a zoned heating system. With a typical central heating system, there's no way to divert warm air into the rooms that need it most — warm air from the furnace or heat pump simply circulates around every room of your house equally. This can cause certain areas of your home such as your first floor or your basement to become uncomfortably cold during the winter, causing you to turn up the thermostat in order to keep them warm.

When you install a zoned heating system, multiple thermostats along with motorized dampers are placed in your home in order to divert warm air to the areas that need it most. It allows you to keep every room of your home at a comfortable temperature during the winter without wasting energy. To help you determine if a zoned heating system is the right option for you, here's what you need to know.

What Is a Zoned Heating System?

A zoned heating system uses multiple thermostats connected to motorized dampers installed in your air ducts. Each thermostat controls a specific zone in your home, whether it's an entire floor or just a single room. When the thermostat senses that the room has been heated adequately, it closes the damper and prevents warm air from entering the room — this diverts the warm air towards other rooms in your home that need more heating. When the thermostat senses that the rooms in your home need to be heated again, it automatically opens the damper and allows warm air inside the room. The end result is that the warm air produced by your central heating system goes exactly to where it's needed at all times, maintaining a comfortable temperature in every heating zone in your home.

How Is a Zoned Heating System Different From Simply Closing Air Vents?

You may have heard that closing the air vents in your home can damage your central heating system. This is true — your central heating system was installed with the assumption that all of the air vents in your home would be open at all times. When you begin to close air vents as a method to manually zone your home, you increase the static pressure of the air in your home's air ducts. This causes the blower fan in your central heating system to work harder in order to circulate air around your home, which can cause damage to the motor.

Thankfully, the risk of damaging your central heating system due to high static pressure is avoided with a zoned heating system. A bypass duct will be installed near the motorized dampers. When the motorized dampers close, air will enter the bypass duct and immediately circulate back into your heater instead of entering your air ducts and raising the static pressure in your home. This keeps the static pressure in your air ducts at a low level, preventing your blower fan from becoming damaged.

How Does a Zoned Heating System Save Energy?

Installing a zoned heating system can significantly reduce the amount of energy you waste attempting to keep problem areas in your home comfortably warm. For example, you may need to keep your thermostat on a high setting in order to maintain a comfortable temperature on the first floor of your home — at the same time, this setting can cause the temperature on the second floor to become too warm. You're needlessly wasting energy heating the second floor of your home past the point where it's comfortable. When you install a zoned heating system, the warm air produced by your heater goes exactly where it's needed due to the action of the motorized dampers, which prevents you from wasting energy heating your home. Because of this, a zoned heating system can save you a large amount of money on your monthly heating bill.

If you're tired of fighting with your thermostat in order to keep the entirety of your home at a comfortable temperature, call a professional heating installation company and ask about installing zoned heating. A zoned heating system can be installed using your existing furnace or heat pump, making the installation process easy and affordable. 

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