Retrofitting zone control
When the pandemic closed down businesses, I managed to restructure our responsibilities to work from home.
I realized that I legitimately savor it.
I no longer worry about traffic, driving conditions or finding a parking space. I’m able to set our own hours, work in sweatpants & avoid the distraction of coworkers. To reduce distractions & maximize productivity, I converted a spare room into our beach living room. I cleared the space & set up our desk, chair, monitor & keyboard. I used to head out of the home at 7 AM several days a month & not return until around 6 PM. I made sure to lower the control machine before leaving to conserve energy. I’m now beach home almost all of the time. It didn’t take long to notice an increase in our weekly energy bills, however suddenly the a/c or oil furnace are running a lot more often & working way harder. The biggest complication was that I was heating or cooling the entire home to the ideal comfort level while I was occupying a single room. After some research into the several benefits of zone control, I reached out to a local Heating, Ventilation & A/C contractor. To install zoning into our existing heating/cooling plan I needed a central control that communicates between control units, dampers & the oil furnace & a/c. Thermostats were installed into each room that send a signal to the control panel & attach to an app on our smartphone, but zone dampers were installed into the ducts to regulate the airflow to each room of the house. The dampers automatically open & close depending on the setting of the particular control unit.