If you’re building a new house or planning a room addition that will require an upgrade of your HVAC system, consider including zoned cooling and heating in your plans. Zoned cooling and heating allows you to control the temperature in several areas of your house using multiple thermostats, instead of having a system that is supposed to do the impossible – keeping your whole house at a comfortable temperature using one centrally located thermostat. A zoned system will save you money on energy costs and let you keep every room in your house more comfortable.
You simply cannot maintain a constant temperature throughout an entire building with one thermostat. If your house has multiple levels, the lower levels will stay cooler than the upper levels due to convection of warmer air as it rises above cooler air. Even a single-story house will have temperature variations due to incoming solar radiation on south-facing walls and roof areas. Rooms on the south side will tend to be warmer than rooms on the north side. Your kitchen will be hotter than the rest of the house any time you’re using your stove or oven. Rooms with a lot of windows will have different temperatures than rooms on the interior of the home or without many windows.
Zoned cooling will let you adjust the temperature of different designated zones to match the needs of their occupants and to save energy. A zoned system uses baffles in the ductwork controlled by individual zone thermostats to control the flow of conditioned air into each zone. You can set your kitchen thermostat to provide more cool air in that part of your house while you’re cooking and have the thermostat in the unoccupied bedrooms upstairs set for a much higher temperature at the same time. This keeps you from wasting energy cooling empty rooms just so the temperature in the kitchen stays tolerable on our hot North Texas summer afternoons.
Call us at James Lane when you’re ready to build a new home or upgrade your existing HVAC system. We will help you design a zoned cooling and heating system for comfort and energy efficiency. Customers throughout the Wichita Falls area have relied on us for their home comfort needs since 1957.
