Arzel Zoning
Get a rundown of some of the customizable controls and how they can be used in unique ways to maximize your customers’ needs and comfort.
We offer custom boards, and all these can be mixed and matched and added to any of our panels, or they can be built into custom panels on their own. So one of the first boards that we offer is going to be our Smart (add-a) Zone. So this particular board can be built into a panel on its own. And really the strength of this particular board, when it’s built in an AloneZone panel, essentially what you can do is if you have a room in a home that’s over conditioning and the customer doesn’t want to do complete zoning in the whole home, you could essentially zone just that room.
So if it’s, you know, a bedroom right above the furnace, or a mudroom, entryway, something like that that’s constantly overshooting, you can actually use just the AloneZone. You would only damper the runs in that particular area. And what it would do is it would have its own thermostat open and close the dampers in just that particular area to prevent over conditioning.
So, you know, if you don’t have a customer that’s completely sold, wants to do whole zoning, or they really won’t benefit from whole zoning, they may only have 1 or 2 rooms in the home that they’re having issues with. This is definitely a really nice result for them.
Also, with that smart (add a) Zone, we can actually build this into any one of our panels as well, so you can use it as just a typical slave. Or you can add it to any one of our panels, and it could be field installed. Or at no cost to you guys, we actually pre-build them in panels as well. So if you need an extra zone on a panel, you don’t want full equipment control, but you still want that damper operation. So you can use this on one of our other panels.
So you got a room with 1 or 2 runs in the room, and it’s not big enough to make it its own zone. You can make it a slave. And then that way it would rely on any other zone on the panel to call before it opens or closes these dampers. So that way you’re not blasting your full equipment into a room with two dampers in there.
It’s able to join in on any one of those zones as long as it’s under the same function. The board is really simple. All it has is a leaving air temperature sensor that attaches to the board. You guys are going to run that up into your main plenum on the ductwork. And as long as your thermostat matches the ductwork temperature, it’ll allow for those dampers to open or close depending on the function that it’s under.
So it’s a really nice alternative to micro zoning. So it gives you guys another option as far as just making a bedroom or something like that it’s own zone. It’s a much better thing to do rather than make a really big bypass or something like that.
And then we also offer our ZVI board. This is just going to be our zone valve interface. So we have multiple uses for this board as well. It was originally designed to interface with WaterFurnace, Lennox Harmony equipment. So they’re communicating pieces of equipment. If you guys are not aware, none of our panels are actually capable of communicating with communicating equipment. So you would need to use a 24-volt thermostat with any of our panels.
Say you update a furnace, the customer already has Arzel dampers in the home. You guys have put a communicating piece of equipment. A lot of that we can piggyback off of. So you can actually still keep our dampers, and then you can use either the zone valve interface panel or if they already have an AirBoss panel, you can actually piggyback off of that as well.
If you have questions about that, we can show you guys off a wiring diagram for something like that. It’s really easy. I mean, essentially what you would do is you use their proprietary zone control, we piggyback off their damper outputs, and then we control our dampers, and then they control the staging of the equipment so we can do it.
There are some brands we are not capable of communicating with at all to. For us to piggyback off any zoning manufacturer out there, they need to be either spring open or spring closed dampers. We cannot adapt to anything that’s power open, power closed. So if you guys do, you have any questions on if we’re compatible with a piece of equipment just give us a call in tech support. There’s typically no wait time. We can help you guys out, get you guys the proper diagrams, anything you would need.
Also, with that same panel, this is your diagram. So I won’t get real technical into this, but essentially all we’re doing is piggybacking off of the normally closed outputs of the damper. And then we send our DC voltage to our solenoids and then open and close the dampers in the zone.
So it’s really, you know, simplified. You’re controlling all the staging from their piece of zoning. And then we’re just opening and closing dampers. Then also with the ZVI board, we have a lot of different uses for this particular board. So we can pair it up with any of our panels. And you guys can have this custom built. So it would be all in the same enclosure box.
This diagram here is just the HeatPumPro with the ZVI, which is controlling hydronic back up heat. So their main source of heat is going to be their W1, which is going to be their baseboard. And then if it’s not able to maintain it’s going to energize energize the heat pump in with it.
One of the other boards that we offer that not a whole lot of our contractors are familiar with or is going to be our FACT board. So this used to be our slave board. So it can still be used for that as well. But it also adds fresh air requirements. So you guys can add any kind of customizable control that you would like on this particular panel. So if you guys want to do an outdoor timer or temperature humidity, you can add this to this board and actually do fresh air requirements.
I mean, it can also be used for a slave board. Really the only benefit of using this board over the newer slave that we use, that AloneZone, is this one is not based on temperature at all. So if you guys have a really low temperature rise on a piece of equipment or something like that, and you don’t think the specs would be met, you can use this board and it piggybacks on your output side of the board. So it relies nothing on temperature. It’s only on the call of the panel. So we can also use this. If you had a geothermal unit or something along those lines a lot of times we’ll recommend using the FACT board instead.
Typical diagram that we did for the FACT control. This is just giving you an idea of all the different kind of controls you can team up with the FACT control to add in fresh air. We do offer fresh air dampers as well, which are spring-closed dampers. So if there was ever a failure it would hold the damper closed. And you can use this with an outdoor timer, enthalpy controls, humidity controls. I mean, really anything you guys want you can actually do with this board. So a lot of different uses. If you guys have a custom application and are unsure of how to do it, you can always give us a call. Give us a couple days. We usually make a diagram for you, go over it with you, make sure you have no questions or anything like that.
This is just your typical wiring diagram for a slave. And this is for the FACT control as well. So you can see it just plugs into your damper outputs. And it would be either for heat pump or just conventional gas furnace / air conditioning on your outputs. You would wire this up. And as long as it is receiving the output signal for the same call that your thermostat’s under, then it allows the dampers to open.
So it acts a lot like the AloneZone. But the AloneZone’s all based on temperature. This is based on voltage. So it reads your output on the panel itself.
We offer a lot of custom wiring strategies. So if you have any kind of oddball scenarios out there: If you’re doing a wood burner, trying to pair that up with a heat pump or something like that, we do offer all those services as well so we can make you guys a diagram, go over it with you, and get you squared away for the job.
We also do a lot with hydronics as well. So this is just a custom diagram we did for a customer with some zone valves, baseboard heating with the HeatPumPro. And this is without the ZVI. So this is more with relays and that kind of stuff. So you can do it either way. Really depends on what you guys are comfortable doing and what you think will look best. Some contractors don’t want to use a bunch of relays, so you can use that zone valve interface. It’s just relays built into a box essentially. So it really depends on how clean of a look you want, what you guys are going for.
Some of the things we’ve done in the past: smoking rooms, kitchen exhaust, so make up air for the kitchen exhaust hood, wood fired boilers with hydronics in the back up. We also offer secondary pump controls. Any of our panels can handle up to 35 dampers, with no added controls on the panel at all. If you are ever going over 35 dampers, we can build you a custom panel and it would be able to do up to 70 dampers.
There’s a lot of different things. We try to make it as easy for the contractors as possible to just kind of keep in mind, if you guys got an oddball situation out there, trying to make it work, give us a call. If we can’t make it work with our product, we can at least try to steer you in the right direction. That’s kind of what we’re here for in tech support.