How do you find opportunities for zoning in the field? This webinar guides you through some steps to follow. Build your business while you increase your customers' comfort, with these practical tips.
When we talk about zoning, we’re talking about selling comfort.
Our customers might not necessarily need comfort, but they want to be comfortable. We want to be comfortable in our homes. Our customers want to be comfortable in their homes. And zoning is a great way of evening out comfort in the house with our single, central system. So, if we have an existing forced air system, and we have existing ductwork, we can further optimize that by zoning it, and we can enhance our comfort significantly through zoning.
When we look at zoning, and we’re looking at talking to our customers about it, we really need to get to know our customers. The best way to get to know our customers is as a technician that’s been in that door year after year doing the maintenance checkups. We should be willing to have those conversations with the customer to really get to know them. To get to know what it is they’re looking for, the problem spots in their home. Then as we have those conversations with the customer, they’re going to tell us what they want. We just must be listening for it. We must identify those opportunities.
As we get to know our customers, that makes it easier to start offering improvements to their home for energy efficiency, improved comfort, indoor air quality, air cleaners, UV lights, things like that. Zoning is a comfort improvement, but it also saves energy. When we’re not conditioning the entire home as a whole, we start to break it down and condition the places that need to be conditioned at that present time.
So identifying opportunities. Problem areas would be load diversity. The sun rises on one side of the home, it sets on the other side of the home. As that sun moves around the house, that load shifts. We’ve got remote zones. Bonus rooms over the garage are very popular with a lot of homes today. A lot of times the ductwork is run there, but the ductwork isn’t finished. It’s just run into that area, it’s capped off, and then oftentimes the equipment itself isn’t sized to handle that additional load. So if we have a remote zone like that, we don’t have to replace the equipment to upsize it for that area. We can zone that off, and as we direct the BTUs from other parts of the home that don’t need it, we can effectively condition those areas that are in remote locations.
Usage patterns: how are they using the home? Do they have a home office? Do they work from home? Right now a lot of people are doing that, and that’s an opportunity for us as well. And then conditioning requirements. My wife likes it hot, I like it cold, so that’s something that the two of us can have our areas where we can condition them so we’re comfortable temperature-wise. And that works better for us and helps us stop those thermostat wars in the home.
Hot and cold spots. How often do we walk into a home where it’s 5, 8, 10 degrees hotter upstairs than it is on the main floor of the home? The thermostats on the main floor, but the master suite’s upstairs or the bedrooms are upstairs, and the customers are complaining that they have to set their thermostat on the main floor at 65 degrees so they can sleep comfortably on the second floor. Those are all opportunities for zoning. It’s a very effective solution if they have an existing forced air system with ductwork.
Inefficiencies in the system. Often ductworks not designed to distribute the airflow properly, so a little extra control, to direct that air where it needs to be, goes a long way to improving an inefficient system.
