How to Install Room-By-Room Zoning in an HVAC System | Ask This Old House

[Music] the majority of homes in America about 90% actually have some sort of ducted heating or cooling system there's a central furnace or air conditioner like this generally in the basement maybe in the attic or in the garage and it's got a unit like this a furnace to make the air warm this is the cooling coil to make the air cold there's a fan to push the air through through a main trunk now this main trunk has branches right here that go to individual rooms at the end of those branches there are registers in the rooms the air also has to get back through a return like this back to here to be reheated or we cooled now as somebody who works in these systems I will tell you there was one complaint that we always get from homeowners it is that it is uncomfortable the wrong temperature from room to room from floor to floor they also complain that it's noisy dusty or drafty now there's a challenge to getting these things right from the beginning you need the right size unit furnace the right size duct the right size branch the right size register the right size return you need to be sure the ducts are sealed and insulated and that generally doesn't happen today we're actually going to see a new system that actually fixes these systems and makes them comfortable so dip you invented this cool new system but you're not from the HVAC industry no I actually come from the defense industry where I worked on missile defense your rocket scientists you know we were engineers that would hit bad guy missiles out of the sky with other missiles and as we built those systems you know I got really good at understanding the different sensors you needed to make that happen which is temperature pressure humidity sure you know and my career brought me around to different homes and apartments around the country and I learned that you know they were very uncomfortable the apartment you're in was on every single apartment you know and it was almost a dozen of them actually and you know what we learned was if you knew the temperature pressure and humidity you could solve the problem fix it yeah and that's what we've done i'm dinah students can't wait to show you we're installing one now I've always zoned ducted systems using conventional motorized amperage and cut them down into the ductwork and you can have a couple of zones upstairs versus down right we actually zone right here at the vent itself and here's a typical vent that you might in a home so there's a floor register that's got the damper on the back home owners always try to close these off and make all kinds of noise that's right if you look at ours they look very similar but that's where the similarities end and it all starts here in the front as you pop the faceplate out so you're battery-operated no wires no wires three to five years of battery life on normal double-a batteries and we actually have a circuit board here that's got a little radio in it and a brain so that's the brains that's the brains now here's what's really cool on the back here we've taken a lot of the same sensors that we used in missile defense actually to sense the temperature and the pressure of the airflow coming out of the diamond sensor right there right there in the back and what's really cool about this vent is it also opens and closes as you see here so here's the damper but look at that that's right oh cool silent and quiet yeah that's right but that's not enough just to understand what's happening at the event from a temperature perspective and so what we did was we built a sensor that really unlocks what's happening in the room so this goes right over conventional outlet you plug that in and you still have your two outlets there that's right and what you also have your is USB that allows you to charge your devices all right which is fun but it also yeah and it senses the temperature pressure and humidity of the room it's it okay so one of these plug in the wall air temperature sensors for every register well actually one per room and then you replace every register in the house one of our intelligent runs here ready to start yeah absolutely so this is the right one for here that's right same size look at that that's pretty simple we're gonna we're gonna put this so you know you can really plug it in anywhere but for now we can actually plug it right in here [Music] [Music] you [Music] so now that we replaced every vent in the house with one of the intelligent vents and we have the sensors in every room of the home they all communicate with each other through the hub okay and what happens is they send all that information that they're collecting all the time right here to the hub and the way the hub works is it just plugs right into the wall here power and then you hook it up to the homeowners internet connection here and then what the hub will do is take all that information mash it all together and get you room by room temperature control so here's how a homeowner would control their home off the smart phone you had everything nowadays exactly so this is our house right here this is the house right here so I can see master bath kitchen dining room guest that's cool living room so do they still have a thermostat well you know you have one and that thermostat is basically now a switch that tells the heater and cooler when to turn on but it's really the hub making the decisions and all those sensors are in the rooms you have it so okay so I can set the temperature turn it up or down anywhere I want that's right also what we have here is seen so let's just say it's time for bed I can click bed here and the home will basically adjust to the rooms that I'm in set them the way I want and the rooms I'm not in for instance the kitchen you know will get shut down and you can change those scenes based on time of day or exactly you can schedule those scenes it's so cool so and I think about zone email it totally worries me to death that you close off and of zones you're going to either burn up the furnace and make it fail or freeze the air conditioner right now we're back on air flow and pressure as we talked about in the early days right and what you have to do is make sure you have enough air flow and so because the hub is making all those decisions it makes sure you never close off so many events that you create a problem which actually prolongs the life of your HVAC because we're maintaining that airflow you'll always have the right airflow going across the furnace so you will burn it up you won't freeze the coil you won't have a service call you have exactly you have my attention I'm so glad you switched in rocket science HVAC media was for a while finally comfortable [Music]

Channel: This Old House

Views: 628,944

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Episode, TV Show, Richard Trethewey, hvac system, smart home, HVAC, plumbing, heating, expert, smartphone technology install, installation, room-by-room, plumbing 101, plumbing basics, plumbing tricks, house plumbing system, how to plumb a house

Id: KC1GGNPj2Ls

Length: 6min 29sec (389 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2016