Mike Cappuccio, founder of N.E.T.R., Inc., talks about how to zone the heating and cooling in your home with a heat pump system, and why a whole-home, ductless heating and cooling system may be right for you.
Good morning. I’m Mike Cappuccio, founder of N.E.T.R., and today, I’m here to talk to you about a topic that I just love. It’s “Why would I install an air source heat pump in my house? Why would I want to do zoning in my house? And what about whole home solutions as well? How would you go about this when you come into our home?”
So a lot of people say, “Well, why would I want to zone my home with an air source heat pump heating and cooling system?” Well, let me tell you why. Let me ask you this question. When you walk into your house today, when you come in the front door, is there a switch that you turn on that basically turns on every single light in your home and every single appliance in your home? No, there isn’t. Well, why not? Why are there separate light switches in separate rooms? Because, that’s the way we do things, it’s efficient. We don’t want to have lights and appliances on in rooms where we’re not.
Well, it’s the same thing, when we come into your home and we zone your home with an air source heat pump system. I’m not saying I don’t want the heat on in those zones, sometimes I might want them off, you could turn them off if you want to. But you can turn the temperatures back in those zones. With an air source heat pump zoning system, you can come into a home and zone separate rooms, separate temperatures, to either turn off, turn on, higher temperatures, lower temperatures. Someone might like it at different temperatures.
But with the zoning capabilities, you pick up tremendous amounts of energy efficiency. So, example, if you work from home now, in the days of COVID, and you have a home office, but you have maybe three kids in three bedrooms, and everyone goes to school during the day and you’re home working during the day. Well, why do I want to heat and cool every single area of the home? When I’m spending eight hours in the office at home I just want that one office to be cold.
Just think of that energy efficiency you can pick up in your home by doing that. When we looked back at the days of the old air source heat pump, we only used these units in maybe one room, where we used it as an add on system, maybe in a sunroom, or a bonus room, or something like that. But, now we have basically complete whole-home zoning solutions.
So again, now I’ll get into the whole home side of it. I’ll give you some examples of a way that a whole home solution can work. A lot of times people have a two story home, bedrooms up, living areas are down, and they might have a full attic where we can go up into the upstairs in the attic and do a whole home solution for every single bedroom on a ducted unit, where that might be one zone of the home, where the whole top level of the home has now become one zone with a ducted system. Down below, maybe have a home office, a kitchen, living room, dining room, and we can put four ductless units and do four different zones downstairs, and make that into five different zones.
So just think of that. If no one’s upstairs sleeping during the day, you can turn that temperature back to 50 degrees on the heating side. Or even on the air conditioning side, why do I want to air condition upstairs in the summertime when no one’s there? I can have that thermostat set back on a timer, whatever you want it to do, to pick up the energy efficiency. And basically have the unit outside running the three or four units downstairs, versus all five units running at a quarter of the speed of what it would run at with a traditional system.
You really have to think of that for energy efficiency. You’re only using the energy that you need in the areas of where you’re living in your home at that point in time. So, it’s a way of really looking at your home, when we come out to your home. What are your needs? How do you live in your home? Where do you spend a lot of time in your home? What will the next five years look like in your home?
So, these are all great topics of discussion when you have a home comfort consultant come out to your home, to look at doing zoning in a whole home solution in your home.
