Thinking about going to a zoned setup

Hey guys, looking to get some input on possibly going with a zoned setup.

As it stands I have two distinct "trunks" in the HVAC system, the front trunk (basically front room, front bedroom, foyer and front lower bedroom in the future) and the rear trunk (kids bedrooms, main bath, family room, kitchen, master bath, master suite, dining room, laundry room, lower kitchen and utility area), which makes them common-sense to convert into separate "zones", but I figure the master suite and master bath could be damper'd seperately to be a third "zone".

The big issue for this is because the master suite is the only one with a 8" duct and that is because of not only the square footage of the master suite (about 600-650 sq/ft including the heated/cooled closet and master bath), but also because the run length is at least 2x longer than any other run in the house.

Now, the reason to make that a zone by itself is to allow for automatic dampers to redirect more air into the suite as needed. I also like the idea of configuring the electric baseboard heat to be a 2nd stage heating method that can be locked out above a certain temperature outside (which is when the electric would come into play since I already know when it is extremely cold out the furnace heat cannot keep up).

Am I approaching this properly?

I figure if I setup automatic dampers for zone 1 (front trunk) properly and zone 2 (rear trunk minus master suite/bath) as well as zone 3 (master suite/bath) and set the opening/closing points for the dampers properly, once zone 2 heats up (which heats quicker than zone 1 or zone 3) then it will close to a preset "close" point and then force more air into zones 1 and 3, and once they come up to temp they will close to their preset close point (for zone 3 it would be totally closed since the cold air conducted into that trunk is one of the problems with circulating air to that space).

Now, with those setups, what if you have them set to circulate the air via the fans being set "on", I would assume it would leave the zones open? How does that work in regards to needing the shut down a zone to keep it from overheating/overcooling? Or is it only during a call for heat/cooling that it opens the dampers and in fan mode the dampers stay at their "closed" setpoint???

Just looking for how this all gets setup before I decide this is a proper way of approaching the heating issues I have with the master suite... I would really like to heat it with the furnace as much as possible and only use the electric baseboards when temps drop so low I can't keep the heat up (which may not be an issue if the rest of the zones close down enough to force more air into the suite).

I already know how to control the electric baseboards with a 24v contactor, and figure it is just a configuration setting on the thermostat for that zone.

Any and all input is greatly appreciated.

first off only you would spend thousands of dollars on a zoning system and have a old and uneficient furnace

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Originally Posted by awsomeears

first off only you would spend thousands of dollars on a zoning system and have a old and uneficient furnace

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Why?

Honestly, even if going with a zoned system and everything else caused a 20-25% increase in gas useage, currently the highest gas bill ever was $160... So even at $200/mo for natural gas in uber cold is inexpensive enough that I have no real way to justify going with a newer furnace (one that is far less reliable long-term) for a $30-40 savings a month at those uber-cold times.

That and all the issues with proper venting (again there is no "nice" way to get intake/exhaust done properly without screwing up the exterior aesthetics of the house)... and I like the fact that the chimney stack are "useable"... I mean in driving around the area I live in there is virtually no-one else with a functioning chimney... Looks quite charming actually... And I know you can do the concentric venting thing, but you have to have them stick above the chimney top and i have ornamental chimney toppers, so I want nothing sticking out above them.

So, from not only an aesthetics, but also a cost-effective standpoint it doesn't make much sense to go with a newer high-efficiency setup... I would almost consider it if I could get a ROI of 3-4 years and a life expectancy of 12-15 years+... If not, then why switch?

Plus, even if I do go with a zoned setup, wouldn't it still be valid in case I did eventually update the furnace?

I would focus on getting rid of the electric baseboard before worrying about anything else if possible.

All I'm going to say is this,

1. An 8" round has nowhere near the cfm for 600 sqft. Your concept of pushing more air to other areas when a zone damper closes is flawed. Research designed static pressure, fan curves, friction rate, and duct size and how they pertain to cfm.
On a guess, you could use almost twice the air you have now.
2. Don't take this personal as you may not, but most people who deal primarily with line voltage have a tougher time understanding medium to complex low voltage controls. I don't know what it is, they just do
3. These types if questions are hard to answer without actually seeing the system and possibly doing a real deal manual j load calc to break off zones properly and check for proper sizing.
4. I'm not a control guy. I have a pretty good idea of how to accomplish what you want, but I feel I'm not qualified enough to answer. I don't want to dish out wrong info. I feel what you want is going to take more work that what you're figuring.

And that's my .02

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Originally Posted by Korndogg

I would focus on getting rid of the electric baseboard before worrying about anything else if possible.

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This

That's why the 600sqft room has undersized duct. They tried to make it up with baseboards.

Lash, thanks for the input...

Yeah, the ducted system here was primarily designed for AC usage and was used for furnace heat as a backup. The electric baseboards are EVERYWHERE as that was the primary source of heat for the first 5 years after the house was built (the furnace ducting has notes that the furnace was installed in 89 and first used in 94).

Also, there is a 6" duct going to the master bath and the 8" duct gets split twice, once where it goes to two registers on the far side of the room (opposite from the return duct on the near side so that was done right), but then there is a register on the east side and a register on the west side and the west side register is shared with the closet. So, yeah less than ideal across the board. That duct that is wyed out is basically an insulated flexible duct in the unconditioned storage area at the back of the suite, thus it gets plenty of cold in there, that is why a zoned approach would at least eliminate the secondary factor of picking up too much cold air while the system is recirculating without heating the space (again, we run the blower 24/7 for air quality). So I was hoping that closing off that zone (ie, not having it in fan-on mode all the time, which would allow the damper to be closed except for when the system is heating that zone) would allow for the heat to stay in that room longer instead of being blown-out the way it was last winter when I had that damper full open.

Yeah, I know how bad of an idea it is to use an inline duct-fan, so that is not even on the table as an option.

My problem is, I pretty much want to maximize what I currently have. I have no problem adding on, ie, the zoned system itself, just that I have a funny feeling if I end up contracting someone to come in and figure it all out it would end up being a complete system replacement including adding ducting or a complete separate heating system for the master suite itself... I just see any or all of that being a hell of a lot more cost than what could be recaptured in efficiency over 10 years with maximizing what I currently have...

I just can't see changing a bunch of stuff when at the moment what I have works for 90% of the home pretty well (I have all areas within 1 degree variance, 2 degrees at most in extreme weather, so between 69-71 everywhere at most, with it mostly being 69-70 or 70-71 or even dead 70 on the nose above 15 degrees F outside).

Blah blah blah whining blah blah blah. This guy probably types faster than most of you neanderthals read. He also puts thought into it. Which is strange on a forum full of people that supposedly are car enthusiasts... but what I usually see for "tech" is "where should I take my car to get my windshield wipers changed?". If he put this on a forum for home improvement... or even tractorbynet no one would ever think anything of it and would add something worthwhile.

600sqft and say 8' ceilings makes for 4800 cuft of air. An "OK" furnace pushing through an 8" round duct with a decent return moves about 250cfm... and yes you can get more but you usually end up with noisy ducts. 4800/250=~20 minutes to turn over the air. You want it to turn over the air about every 13 minutes to be "happy". For air conditioning to be effective when it's hot out it used to be 1cfm per 1sqft but I don't know if that is true anymore, I've been out of it too long.

You need a fairly elaborate controller to do what you need. You basically need some VAV boxes to do what you're trying to do effectively... and a controller to run your many systems. The commercial ones I've used aren't cheap. Years ago I used DZ3 and 1-wire sensors. You might be able to find a fairly elaborate thermostat you could control with a Vera3 or something. I don't know, I haven't looked into it in a long time. I heat with wood these days.

Thanks Wrath... That is the kind of info I was looking for...

Started looking up more of the calcs needed for this stuff... Damn, I could spend a good week checking things out and doing the calcs and pretty much still need a blower door test to determine true efficiency...

But, it is looking like a multi-stage newer furnace would be the only real solution if I did zone everything. Otherwise you run the real risk of the system bypassing too much and tripping the heat limit before the zone needed is totally heated in the worst case, or the entire system balance would take a long time to stabilize with the system running for long run times and all the zones basically wreaking havoc on area to area stability. That is unless you zoned on every damper or branch seperately, but then you still have the issue of balancing the flow through if you don't totally close off zones (ie, bleed through). With a newer multi-stage setup it could stage when necessary along with a multi-speed blower to reduce overall CFM and pressure differentials when various zones are in use or bypassed.

Luckily, my little experiment with trying to get the entire system to work without such zoning with a "hail mary" of using medium-high blower speed during heating and low blower speed during circulation seems to have hit the mark. Two days now and everything is within a degree or two. Todays sun through a monkey wrench in on checking differentials this afternoon, so I used the opportunity to install the Redesigned Prestige 2.0 thermostat setup along with a bunch of sensors. I also installed the EConnect line-voltage thermostat in the master suite along with a 240v 40amp contactor for all the baseboards. Works pretty well overall on both upgrades.

I'm interested in this thread because I want to use geothermal to cool my house. I need a fairly fancy controller and maybe a couple VAV boxes to get it done.

Let's see if I can get belittling, condescending, and whatever else you goofs are whining about in one post.

This interest is because I want to cool my house using fairly "green" methods. My house is located 25 miles from the city on a nicely paved road that I can walk to town from in roughly 13 minutes. It has 22 acres of which 19 are wooded with Red Oak, River Birch, and Hickory. Splitting that 22 acres in half is a creek about 7' wide and 1' deep that flows at about 3fps even at its lowest point. Sometimes it's over 4' deep and flows 6-7fps. Over 600' the creek has about 4' of head. Also in that 22 acres is a 1.5 acre pond that is spring-fed that also has an island that which the overflow goes into the creek.

I want to build a spiral water wheel (need about 18' in diameter and 3 wraps if my math is right) and a weir upstream of the steel 8'x22' bridge I constructed over the creek. Then I'll use that spiral water wheel to pump 450' uphill (using the earth as the heatsink) about 21' of grade through 1" PVC tube to the basement of my house in which I will have air-to-water heat exchangers to cool the house. The discharge will be in the woods in which I will make a new pond adjacent to the creek so I have a fishing hole that isn't in the 1.5 acre pond that is 17' deep and full of panfish and large mouth bass.

I need a decent controller, preferably one that is 1wire capable, so I can control high-volume fans to pump cooled air throughout the house in 2" PVC. In order not to freeze people to death with ~49° water temperature in certain areas I will likely need VAV boxes. Since I can essentially run it continuously without much energy cost (blower motor only) it makes little sense to turn off the fan(s).

I have the materials to make the weir. I have the PVC tube (30 year NSF 1"). I have a trencher. I have the air-to-water heat exchangers. I have a couple multiple-speed squirrel cage furnace blower motors. I just need to buy the angle to build the spiral water wheel and create some ductwork.

I'd comment in the lawn thread but it's pretty much pointless. Going by the rate that jbiscuit puts human waste on his yard he has 1/4-1/3 acre. I have more lawn between my house and detached garage than that. Heck, my garden is larger than most of your guys' yards (55x85 fenced, another 25x55 unfenced). Milorganite is cooked human waste complete with heavy metals and all sorts of other good "shit" from the Xanax and Prozac nation. No way am I going to put it on my yard that my dog and I walk barefoot in... and my chickens graze in... near my wellhead.

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Originally Posted by jbiscuit

The website would never launch because these 2 would have to re-engineer the internet first, quadruple firewall everything with systems copied from the Pentagon and then post about the $45,821 servers they have to host it :rolf

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I know the Intarnets pretty well. Pretty sure we could run it off a pair of PA 4020 or Cisco 5585 in a failover set unless we have sooper fast intarnet connection more than 4-way multihomed, a few of Dell R720 with 384GB of RAM and a pair of E5-2637v2 connected via a pair of QLogic QLE2672 16gb HBAs to a pair of Brocade 6510 switches to an EMC VNX5600 with 2TB of FAST cache and six back-end buses and 12 front-end ports per storage processor... I'm impartial to running SCVMM 2012R2 or ESX 5.5 as the hypervisor. Sounds like something I bought last quarter... might be overkill for 1-2 visitors per month.

please keep this on topic. if you dont like what you see from certain members....IGNORE THEM

and yes I did edit a single post here to keep this thread on topic.

Thanks Yoo...

Well, I have been doing the damper "dance" in balancing them out with the new thermostat and I have come across another interesting difference in this one compared to the old one. The old one was a Hunter brand with wireless remote temp sensors. This new one is a Prestige with wireless remote temp sensors. The Hunter could be set to read any individual sensor or to average any combination of the sensors, including the one in the thermostat. The Prestige can be set to use any sensor for temp or to average any combination of remote sensors. Sounds similar, but the big difference in the user feedback. It is obvious that the Prestige is designed for the pro installer as they do not let you get a direct reading from any of the sensors. It will always show the "average temp" of the sensor(s) chosen, not the immediate swing of the sensors. That is further masked by the fact that the Prestige uses a cycles per hour setting to cycle the furnace and the Hunter used a span setting to determine the temperature differential it used to decide when to turn the furnace on. The cycles per hour calculates out the run time to keep things at a given temperature and basically keeps cycling the heating system to to the set numbers of cycles to keep things comfortable. Great for comfort, but talk about the wear and tear on the furnace. With the old thermostat nobody noticed the span of 2 degrees (so if the thermostat was set at 70, it would turn on at 69.5 and off at 70.5). I could have set the span to 1, but that seemed excessive. I do find the lack of being able to read the sensors a huge let down, but again from a "pro" viewpoint they don't want people calling that they are seeing this temp or that temp and to keep the user ignorant and have them just see and feel the system "working" is probably the right way to go for the majority of users. Us that *want* to know are left using other methods to check temps in remote areas.

So, considering the wasted gas while the furnace comes up to temp and the wear and tear on the blower motor, as well as the fact that things seem quite stable with longer run times I am probably going to reduce the cycles per hour to 4 or even 3 and see how things go.

Wrath, I like your idea a whole lot. The gross energy savings could be substantial. I like the idea of the system being self-sufficient in everything except for the blower fans. And I am a big proponent of constantly circulating air for indoor air quality, so that is just a given. With proper volume control you should be able to run it continuously, have even temps and have it be efficient. I am finding that proper balance and long-term stability are the keys to efficiency and hampered only by the desire for fast-result dynamics (such as setbacks and recovery). Sure, there are some savings to be had to setback to a much lower temp, but in the case of a bedroom, who wants to get into a bed that is at 62 degrees because the room is set to 62 after you wake up and only gets up to a comfortable temperature just before you get set to go to bed. The bed takes much longer to come up to temp, you need to set the recovery to the point where it can heat the bed up by the time you want to get into it. Now, with that being said, say you want to go to bed early one evening. You are pretty much screwed having to get into a cold bed. There reaches a point where it just doesn't make sense to use setbacks due to the compromises it makes. Since we always have someone home at some point of the day it makes no sense to use a dynamic schedule and have found I like the expectation that the temp is held constant throughout the day. Kinda goes back to the old dial thermostats where the temp was set and that is what it was. I am sure for a lot of households that dialing back the temp during the day, or even in the evening (especially with a zoned setup) it makes sense, just not a lot for us.

On that thought, using a zoned setup it would make setbacks a lot more reasonable. But, again, it all comes down to how you live in your home. The most common-sense zone would be a bedroom, to drop the temp after you get up and only raise it in the evening before you go to bed (which kinda kills the idea of a nap, but I digress), and also the other areas that are unoccupied during sleeping. But what about large open floor-plan areas that take a long time to heat up to comfortable temps, but usually end up cooling off much quicker? In those instances you *need* a proper zoned system to pump excessive amounts of warm air into those areas to overcome the differentials. So it would seem it is an 'all or nothing' proposition. Which is what I have come to as a major deciding factor in going that route. In my case I would need to zone the bedrooms as zone 1, the front room/foyer and dining room as zone 2, the kitchen/family room/mudroom as zone 3 and the theater/computer center as zone 4. There is even the possibility of needing to add another zone when I finish off the utility area. This is all assuming I can get the rooms balanced properly to begin with and that it will remain balanced with dynamic system pressure (such as only a zone or two open at once). Then what do you do to facilitate air circulation in that case? I mean with a single stage heat source do you shut off zones entirely during heating of other zones? I can just see a system constantly doing a very complicated and intricate dance with gross amounts of heat being bypassed at times, the system running continuously at other times and still yet times when the system would reach a thermal limit because of bypass. I will say using a system with a cycles per hour makes a lot of these things "doable" with various zones opening and closing and not having to worry about overheating because of the cycles involved. I still see it as being a huge PITA to do properly and get balanced. Almost seems like taking a sledgehammer to something that may be just fine with fine-tuning. I can only see benefits if you go through the hassles of the fine-tuning even with a zoned setup though. I can see why the industry goes to zones in a lot of cases, as the amount of time to fine-tune it otherwise makes it a non-viable solution. Just seems liek you are introducing a lot of other issues with zones as well.

That is why I am trying so hard to get my current setup working and balanced the way it is. I am noticing that most of the dampers on the main level are set to the same settings used for summer. The upper level dampers are set lower in winter compared to wide open in summer (except for the master suite) and the lower level is set with the damper more open in winter compared to summer. The big difference is the family room and kitchen, with them needing less damper opening in winter than summer only because they get a ton of light in the afternoon, thus heating up naturally. It is not uncommon for those areas to swing 3-5 degrees with no hope of controlling them unless the shades are drawn. That is why the thermostat is in such a bad location in the kitchen (besides the fact that it heats up because of cooking and everyone being in there and the family room as well), but i can see why they did it back when the thermostat there was primarily used for cooling, not heating.

It might be time for you to look at full-on home automation. Perhaps a Vera3 or a Almond+.

Since humans are creatures of habit:
We take showers at night. So, there is a humidity sensor in the bathroom that kicks the fan on and then turns it off when it gets below a threshold. Same sensor is used to turn on an electric blanket to warm the bed if there is humidity for a certain period of time in the bathroom at a certain band of time at night and the bedroom temperature is below a certain threshold. Our living room is usually around 74 (heat with wood) and our bedroom is usually 68ish. If it is warmer than that the heating blanket doesn't get turned on and we tend to open a window to cool the room off.

Females seem to have technical difficulties turning off light switches. Zwave fixes that. It gets expensive when you want to do more than control resistive loads.