Love how you made a video with the condenser unit right next to the gas meter. This is not to code!, Also you didn't mention that zoning should only be done with variable speed equipment. I have been a HVAC tech for 20 years and have yet to see a system designed properly. If you want zoning, buy a house with a boiler and throw this crap in the trash!. Or buy a house with separate units.
I might be using the wrong terms but it looks like you're calling the AC vents a damper. It's my understanding that a damper is installed where the duct originates in order to control the amount of air flowing from the machine to each of the rooms throughout the house. Thereby leaving the damper open for the room that is furthest away from the air source and closed for the room that is adjacent or closest to the air source (as it is a permeable membrane which allows some air to pass through even when closed) and this manner when you set the thermostat to 75°, air conditioning the entire house should be 75° in every single room. In my case I don't believe there's dampers in my system because the master bedroom which is on the opposite side of the home from the unit is always warmer and the bedrooms adjacent to the unit are freezing because I'm wasting energy trying to cool the master bedroom. I'm trying to find out how to install dampers in my central AC so the temperature remains the same in all of the rooms.
A vent that opens and closes can be considered a damper, but a traditional damper is installed in the main ducts running out of your furnace and shuts off many rooms or entire floors of your home.If you don't have any zone dampers installed near your furnace and the controls to open and close them when the thermostat calls for heat/cool, these types of room dampers may be a good solution. You may be able to do as you say, but an damper in the basement, but it sounds like home is unbalanced. An HVAC tech may be able to balance your system with manual dampers to get it to heat more evenly. It involved measuring the pressure coming out of each vent and doing some calculations. Any HVAC tech can help with tis. Good luck.
Running the wires through the duct system is pretty stupid.. What if someone needs to have the duct system cleaned later on down the road..?? High volume, forced air can clean ducts, but it's not uncommon for companies to use power whips or agitators to knock loose debris in the duct. Can't clean that way if you have wires in your ducting..
In my home in Colorado we installed a new furnace and AC with wires that went through a duct to the thermostat on the main floor. The ducts were rigid ducting. I had them cleaned before I put the house on the market and the guy disconnected the wire when he hit it with his cleaning machine. It took about 30 seconds to reconnect it. In Florida we don't use rigid ducts therefore you cannot clean the ducts by sticking machinery inside the duct.
The problem with this approach is that the damper is at the register, so heated or cooled air flows all the way down the duct and can't get out, which is inefficient. A better approach is to locate the damper at the duct near the HVAC unit, so more airflow is pushed out of open registers, and energy is not wasted by air moving down a duct that is closed at the far end.
I dont know alot about hvac (only completed community college cert course and epa 608) and even I saw that issue lol, I need to zone my houss its a 3 bedroom all bedrooms upstairs, im in so cal area (riverside) how much is a good price to do it the way you said ?? Thanks
I don't think it quite works that way. Think of the air as water - once the pipe is full, the flow rate becomes 0 and the pressure in the rest of the "pipe" rises. This is also a retrofit installation where zone individual rooms from the source is impossible.
Just built a new home with one of these... doesn't work for shit. I've been scouring the internet trying to find a way to make it work. Found this video. Didn't help. My basement is freezing and upstairs too warm. You could literally accomplish this simply by opening/closing the vents in each room according to the season. Did that in my last two houses and it worked BETTER. Don't buy this.
What is the ballpark cost of something like this? I know there are variables but my home and situation is very much like this video. Ballpark how much per zone you want to add? Should I add one per bedroom on the second floor, leave the first floor and basement their own zones? For a total 6 zones?
I installed a ZoneFirst system on my house before I finished the basement. In all I installed 13 dampers for the upstairs and 7 for the basement. There are five zones and some zones only have one vent so I also installed the Bypass Eliminator kit to prevent excess pressure buildup. It was super easy to do because all of the ducting was exposed and connecting the wiring was a snap. It also cost me a lot less than adding a second HVAC unit to my house. It also works great at keeping my house at a good temperature. But there are some flaws that I hope will be fixed in the future. When the system switches between zones or enters purge mode, there is a short time when the blower turns off and then on. It takes less than a second but it happens all the time. I don't know if it's also happening to the condenser unit but I'll bet it is the same. The second issue is that if one zone reaches temperature and the system shuts off and one minute later another zone needs to turn on, the system will turn right back on. There's no cool down period for the condenser unit. I wish I could set a shutoff time in the system settings. Something that tells the system to wait before turning back on. Anything from 0 minutes to an hour would be great.
If the boards work together well and reliable this is a good way to solve many problems. The bypass eliminator if it work as you say, the only there thing you would need to create a awesome HVAC system is a air handler and compressor that can power down to lets say 25% capacity.
We have a 2 zone system and I can tell a significant difference in heating and cooling of our 2 story home. More efficient and our energy bill has (natural gas) has dropped by over 35%. Adding a 3rd zone to basement which is fairly simple to complete.
I'm thinking about doing this set up on my 2 story home that unfortunately is only 1 zone. there are three registers upstairs as well as the return. The air flow going the upstairs is significantly higher than the down stairs currently and with the return in the upstairs hallway, it seems as if the air upstairs is on a short loop to the return while the downstairs (1250 of the 1850 total sq ft) gets starved. the downstairs has vaulted ceilings in the main area. with the current pressure differential in mind, should there be a bypass installed on the upstairs duct??
This seems to be the ONLY product I've found that will do exactly what I want: Add a simple 2-zone system so that my mountain cabin can provide heat to the main (upstairs) living quarters as well as the lower-level "bunkhouse." The Bunkhouse is right next to the furnace, and would be a sweatbox without a smart thermostat-run zone system.
@ 1:05 SERIOUSLY???? This does NOT reflect on ZONEFIRST but on the contractor! Code requires 3 ft clearance of equipment from a gas meter setting and the meter must be no less than 2 ft from a corner structure. Next time why not just put the condenser on top of the gas meter! Its obvious this job was not inspected by the local government agencies. Sadly, zoning is mostly used to band-aid POOR or NO duct design according to ACCA standards; another reason for using a qualified company who actually knows how to design a system instead of just hanging pipe.
ZONEFIRST is comaptible with any thermostat that can be remotely controlled for a fraction of what some home automation systems do. Not all home automation systems have damper controls either. That's why you need ZONEFIRST.
