Is Your Upstairs Bedroom Too Hot To Sleep In? Technological Advances Let You Make Your Upstairs |
Gone are the days when you have to put up with your upstairs being a miserable 10 degrees hotter than your main floor in the summer. Likewise gone are the winter days when your upstairs is 10 degrees colder and your basement is always too cold.
Advances in forced air heating and cooling let you convert your existing, uncomfortable system into one where you control the comfort of your home. And best of all, it can be done in a day and without any remodeling mess.
In most houses with forced air systems, the furnace or the central air conditioner is controlled by a single, centrally located thermostat. And in houses with multiple floors, the thermostat is located on the main floor.
The problem is that the thermostat only ‘senses’ the temperature where it is located, and as soon as it reaches the temperature you set it for it shuts the system off — regardless of whether other areas of the house are comfortable or not. So while your main floor stays a comfortable temperature, your upstairs never cools down. And in the 90+ degree weather we have been experiencing it can make it unbearable to sleep in.
A trend in new house construction is to put in two separate heating and cooling systems to solve this problem. In this case, there are two thermostats: a main floor thermostat that controls the furnace and central air conditioner for the main floor and an upstairs thermostat that controls a separate furnace and air conditioner for the upstairs.
This approach is impractical to solve the comfort problem in an existing house. Beyond the expense of the separate furnace and air conditioner, this design requires that the existing system ductwork be modified extensively to separate the ductwork into two distinct systems. Further, the problem of a basement that is ‘too cold’ is also not solved by this approach as a separate system for the basement would be required.
The alternative approach is called ‘forced air zoning’. Traditionally this method uses a motorized ‘damper’ to open and close as the thermostat calls for heating or cooling. And while in this method avoids the cost of having two separate furnaces and two separate air conditioners, the motorized dampers are expensive and prone to breakdown.This approach also requires extensive ductwork modifications in existing systems making it expensive and in some cases a time consuming and messy job.
The investment and the major duct system renovations required have made solving the problem of an uncomfortable house impractical for most people. Until now.
The ‘Total Living Comfort’ (TLC) system by Arzel can solve your ’too hot’ and ’too cold’ comfort problem in one day, without the mess, and for about half the cost of the traditional approaches.
While employing the ‘zoning’ approach to solve the problem, the TLC system uses pneumatic (air pressure driven) dampers rather than motorized dampers. However, because pneumatic dampers are so much less expensive than motorized dampers a damper is installed on each ‘heat run’ (the pipe that goes to a register outlet) which avoids the need to modify the ductwork.
The pneumatic dampers are connected by small air tubes to a computerized control center located near the furnace or air handler.
The dampers are grouped together into ‘zones’ by identifying which dampers control the heating and cooling in a certain area of the house. Typical zones are the main floor, the upstairs floor, the basement, and other areas of your house that have different temperature needs.
A thermostat is located in each ‘zone’ that controls the heating and the cooling for that area. So when you set your thermostat for 75 degrees in your upstairs bedroom, it will keep cooling your upstairs even after your main floor has been ‘satisfied’.
And because the TLC control board is ‘smart’, you can even add some heat in the basement — even when you need to cool the rest of the house in the summer — to keep you from ‘freezing out’ your basement family room!
The TLC system comes with a 5 year parts and labor warranty with an option to extend it up to 10 years, but it’s hardly necessary. We have been making houses more livable and comfortable for over 5 years and service problems for the TLC system are rare.
The TLC system lets you enjoy your entire home in comfort whether it is the blistering heat of summer or a frozen winter day. It will even save you energy costs as the parts of the house that are unused during certain parts of the day can be programmed to different temperatures.
To find out how you can have Total Living Comfort, give us a call and set up a time for us to visit you and assess your needs at no cost to you. Call (810) 985-7103 or toll free (888) 985-7103 Monday—Friday