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?

"Edge" wrote in message
...
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?


http://www.homecomfortzones.com/mytemp.htm

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/tv/a...html?x=28&y=17

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.

On May 8, 6:44*am, Edge wrote:
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 got this message "We're sorry, MyTemp is currently only available in
the following states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and
Washington"

"Edge" wrote in message
...
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?

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.")

In article , (Edge) writes:

| 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.

Dan Lanciani
ddl@danlan.*com

RickH wrote:
On May 8, 6:44 am, Edge wrote:
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 got this message "We're sorry, MyTemp is currently only available in
the following states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and
Washington"



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)

--
aem sends...

John Gilmer wrote:
"Edge" wrote in message
...
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?

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.")



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.

TDD