What Benefits Can a Zoning System Offer Your Chicagoland Home?

If you’ve never heard of a zoning system, you’re not alone. Many homeowners have no idea what it does, let alone understand the zoning system benefits that you can receive from its professional installation. Is it something that would improve your Chicagoland home?

How a Zoning System Functions

We’re all familiar with how a traditional cooling and heating system works. Air is drawn into the ductwork, conditioned, and then distributed throughout your home. A zoning system doesn’t disturb that process. What zoning does is improve upon it by allowing you to separate your home into different areas designated as zones, and then concentrating your cooling or heating on only those zones that you choose. It does this, in part, by utilizing multiple thermostats that are controlled by a central unit.

Added Control

Maintaining better control over your home’s cooling and heating is something that every person wants. There are a few different zoning system benefits and gaining more control is at the forefront. A traditional setup will cool or heat your entire home at once, but a zoning system allows you decide which areas to treat. If you have a two-story home, you can even designate each of the floors as its own zone. This functionality makes you the true master of the house.

Lower Energy Usage

Of all the zoning system benefits, this is the one that typically catches a person’s attention right away. You may not realize it, but your current central air and heat setup is inefficient, especially if you have a large house. Each time you switch your air conditioner on, it has no choice but to condition the entire home. Even if you’re in your den all day, using only a fraction of the square footage in your house, every room will be conditioned at once. As you might have guessed, this is a very inefficient method of cooling and heating and leads to a lot of wasted energy, which will be reflected on your energy bill. By concentrating conditioning efforts on a finite number of areas with the use of a zoning system, your costs can be severely lowered.

Improved Comfort

Each and every one of us wants to be comfortable, but we all possess different comfort levels. The problem with a central heating and air conditioning setup is that only one temperature can be chosen for the entire home. So if you’re the kind of person who likes it a little warm while your kids want to turn up the air, someone’s going to be disappointed. With a zoning system, however, these problems don’t crop up so much. This is because you can treat different zones of your home in accordance with a person’s temperature preference. All you need to do is use your zoning system’s central control unit to concentrate additional heating or cooling on the area that another household member (or even yourself) is in. This added control will make everyone happy and keep your home from becoming a war zone as you fight over the thermostat.

Uniquely Designed Rooms

If your home happens to contain uniquely designed rooms, the zoning system benefits you’ll receive can be even greater. Examples of this are rooms that have large windows facing the sun or ones with a high ceiling. These types of rooms can be more difficult to condition evenly. In fact, when trying to treat these specific areas, your HVAC system will run much longer than it needs to because it’s either battling the incoming heat or the size of a room. All of this means that your energy bill at the end of the month isn’t going to look pretty.

The same differences in temperature are true with homes that have more than one story since, as a rule,  heat rises. But as you might have guessed, a zoning system can rectify these situations by allowing you to designate these unusual areas as their own zone. Then, you can either concentrate your heating and cooling efforts on those specific areas or ignore them and condition other rooms that are more comfortable.

For more expert advice on zoning system benefits, or if you have other home comfort questions, please contact the friendly professionals at Climate Master Mechanical Contractors, Inc. We’ve been serving Chicagoland and the surround suburbs of Mokena, Frankfort, New Lenox, Naperville, Orland Park and Tinley Park for over 23 years.

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