Hi, I’m Joel with Arzel zoning tech support. And I’m Jason with Arzel tech support. We wanted to talk to you today about how zoning improves effectiveness, because that’s a big thing when it comes to our customers homes. When we’re looking at zoning, it’s all about controlling the static pressure. It’s all about controlling the airflow and maximizing the comfort and performance delivery for our customers.

So how would you say that our products help improve your energy efficiency of the home? So when it comes to the energy of your home, there’s two different ways that you can use a zoning system. You can keep the entire home at the exact same temperature, or you can use the home based on your actual schedule. How many homes are so much larger than they need to be for maybe two people?

You have your empty nesters. You have people who are just buying a new home for the first time, and they don’t have a whole bunch of people living in there. How much that home to they use at any one time? That’s usually a very small portion of it. So if we control the temperature from the areas that we use our homes at.

Studies have actually shown that by setting back the rest of the house, there can be energy savings anywhere from 15 to 30%. However, if we try to condition the entire home at the exact same temperature, we just want to even out the temperature difference. The zoning does that very well. But our energy savings aren’t really there. So if a homeowner is going to be adding an addition or adding to the existing foot load of a home, how could zoning help improve air delivery?

Let’s say maybe they didn’t have the space for having a second furnace in the house. The existing ductwork is designed for the house. The way it is at the time of construction. But once you add an addition onto that home, you have two choices one, you rip all the ductwork out and you start from scratch to design that ductwork so it can handle that new addition.

Or two. You add zoning because maybe you’ve added a new room onto the back of the house. You’ve added a new suite, and you’ve got some family that’s moving in, and you wanted to provide space for that, but you have a two story house that upstairs is probably going to need conditioning. That new room is probably going to need conditioning, but the main part of the house probably won’t.

So by adding zoning, we can direct the air from the main part of the house where it’s comfortable, and we can send that to the addition without having to do any major duct modifications or without having to upsize the equipment. I’ve heard that zoning can reduce the life expectancy of your Hvac equipment. Is this true? That’s really a common misconception.

The reduction of life on the equipment comes right down to actual design. If my furnace was already too small or too large for my ductwork. So my ductwork, I’m running high static before I even put zoning in, then I’m going to run into a problem with life expectancy on that equipment. Normal design application without zoning is your ductwork should be between 0.4 and 0.5.

Total external static pressure. Once we apply zoning, we want to push that up closer to the maximum that the lower performance data chart allows for in the furnace manual. So with our smallest zone calling by itself, we want to see that around .7. We’re within that range that we look for. And that’s not going to have any impact on the equipment life.

And if contractors wanted to learn more about static pressure and how it affects their equipment, what could they go about finding that info? If they want to learn more about static pressure and how zoning affects the air flow, they can request free classes from us. We can do those online, or we can work with their local distributor and provide them with live in person classes.