Anyone see the recent Ask This Old House show which featured a new product for creating zones for forced air systems? It creates room by room zones by inflating and deflating balloons in the duct work. Anyone see who makes this product and have any experience with it?
I saw it and it was interesting, but I see a lot of room for reliability problems. It would be interesting to know more about it and in particular the reliability of the system.
I seem to recall that the price was a bit pricey and since I have fairly good access to direct runs from the basement, I think I will work from there when I need to replace the current system.
I got this message "We're sorry, MyTemp is currently only available in the following states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington"
Unless that compressor unit is multi-speed, you have to be careful about "zoning" a system with only one compressor.
If you cut the air flow too much you can cause the coils to freeze.
Before you even think about this approach, buy some sigital thermoters and stick them in the register outlets. You might want to make a hole in the duct to measure the temperature of the air coming out of the "inside" coil. Manually shut down (or reduce the flow) to rooms with a low cooling priority and check the other thernometers to ensure the air is still on the right side of 40F.
Since it takes hours for central air to "catch up" the manual approach may well be "gud enuf" for the short term.
If the manual approach gives you the results you need and you are lazy, THEN you can look into dampners (either rotating or "balloon.")
| Anyone see the recent Ask This Old House show which featured a new | product for creating zones for forced air systems? It creates room by | room zones by inflating and deflating balloons in the duct work. | Anyone see who makes this product and have any experience with it?
Enerzone Systems (now Aprilaire?) has had this for years. (I'm looking at an installation manual for "Airzone" copyright 1996.)
Is [Ask] This Old House showing new episodes? I thought they were into summer repeats.
I saw that segment- while amusing, it looked awfully Rube Goldberg to me. And at that price point (especially for somebody that can afford a
13-room house), seems like the traditional solution of splitting the plenum and installing a second furnace and separate Tstat may not be much more expensive. I think they did mention that the original HVAC company stupidly commingled the duct trunks for upstairs and downstairs. When I was a wee lad and my father built his folly for us to live in, it had similar problems, and a second furnace was what we ended up with, but in that case splitting the plenums and returns was trivial due to the house layout. (This was the first partially multi-level no-attic flat-roof contemporary he had built, and not having an HVAC engineer on staff, it was a learning experience for all)
The same problem occurs with gas heating systems. I had a little old lady who had shut the vents to some rooms and she ran the the thermostat at 85 deg because she was cold natured. This caused the high limit on the combustion chamber to trip, shutting the whole system down.
The other nice thing abot simply installing multiple systems is when one goes down you still have heat/ac in part of the house. Both my houses have 2 independent systems.
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