Home Zoning: Keep Your Heating and Cooling Where You Need It
You turn on the heater because the lounge room is cold. Before long, some of that warm air has wandered down the hallway, through the kitchen, into the laundry, across the bathroom and straight up the stairs. The lounge is still not quite warm enough, but the upstairs bedrooms are becoming unpleasantly hot.
In summer, the same problem works in different directions. The air conditioner is trying to cool the room you are using while warmer air continues to drift in from the rest of the house.
You are not simply heating or cooling a room. You are gradually conditioning every connected part of the home. That is where zoning helps.
What Is Home Zoning?
Zoning means dividing your home into areas so that you can heat or cool the rooms you are using without also paying to condition all the rooms you are not. This does not necessarily require a sophisticated ducted system or electronic controls.
In many homes, zoning is created using ordinary physical boundaries:
- internal doors
- properly sealed doors
- sliding doors
- heavy curtains
- noren curtains
- barriers across open stairways
The aim is to keep more of the heated or cooled air within the occupied part of the house.
Australian energy-efficiency guidance recommends heating and cooling only the rooms being used and closing doors to other areas. It is a simple way to reduce the amount of space your system is being asked to condition.
Zoning – What Is It and Why Do I Need It?
Make the House Smaller Without Renovating It
Zoning temporarily makes your home smaller. Not physically smaller, obviously. It reduces the area your heater or air conditioner must manage.
Instead of trying to heat the lounge, hallway, bathroom, laundry, spare bedroom and stairwell, you create a boundary around the lounge and adjoining living spaces. The heating can then concentrate on the area where people actually are.
That can help the occupied rooms reach a comfortable temperature sooner and reduce the amount of heating or cooling that escapes into unused parts of the home. The zone does not have to stay the same all day.
During the morning, it might include the kitchen and dining area. In the evening, it may be the lounge room. At night, the living zone can be opened and the bedroom zone closed. Zoning gives you control over where the comfort goes.
Start with the Wet Areas
Bathrooms, toilets and laundries are often the easiest places to zone out.
They are generally used for relatively short periods, and they also need regular ventilation to remove moisture and smells. There is usually little benefit in continuously heating them along with the lounge room.
Start with the door between the wet area and the main part of the house.
Keeping that door closed creates a basic boundary. Draught-proofing around the sides and top of the door, then adding an appropriate seal at the bottom, makes that boundary much more effective. The wet area can then be ventilated directly to outside without drawing as much heated or cooled air from the rest of the home.
That does not mean sealing moisture inside the bathroom. After a shower or bath, the room still needs active ventilation through an exhaust fan, an external window or both.
The difference is that the bathroom is ventilated as its own zone rather than being permanently connected to the air in the rest of the house.
The existing ecoMaster bathroom zoning guidance recommends sealing the internal door, ventilating the bathroom independently and fitting an automatic draught stopper above suitable exhaust fans so the ceiling opening closes when the fan is off.
Zoning the Bathroom
The Two-Storey Home Problem
Anyone living in a two-storey home knows this one.
In winter, the downstairs heater is running, but much of the warm air rises through the open stairwell. Downstairs remains cold while upstairs becomes much warmer than anyone needs it to be.
The heater keeps working because the room containing the thermostat, or the people, is still not comfortable. Meanwhile, valuable heat is collecting upstairs. In summer, cool air can also move through an open stairwell, making it harder to keep the occupied floor comfortable.
A door across the staircase is the most effective physical zoning solution, but installing one is not always practical. A well-positioned, full-length heavy curtain can still help slow the movement of air between floors.
A lighter noren curtain creates a softer boundary and will provide benefit, although it will not perform as well as a solid door or a heavier, more complete curtain.
The principle is the same: stop the stairwell from becoming a large open pathway between two temperature zones.
Zone Off Hallways and Unused Rooms
Hallways are extremely good at taking your expensive warm or cool air somewhere else. A hallway leading away from the living room may connect to several bedrooms, a bathroom, laundry, back entrance or garage access door. Left open, all those spaces effectively become part of the area being heated or cooled. Closing the doors to unused bedrooms helps, but a boundary at the entrance to the hallway can be even more effective.
Other useful zoning points include:
- the entrance to a bedroom wing
- a laundry or back-entry area
- the door to an attached garage
- a spare room that is rarely used
- an opening between older and newer sections of a home
- a kitchen connected to a cold utility area
Look for the point where the occupied part of the house meets the unoccupied part. That is usually where the zoning boundary belongs.
Zoning an Open-Plan Home
Open-plan living is wonderful when the weather is comfortable. It can be less wonderful when one heater is being asked to warm the lounge, dining room, kitchen, hallway and staircase at the same time.
Zoning does not mean permanently chopping an open-plan home into little rooms. It means introducing temporary boundaries when you are paying to heat or cool the space.
Depending on the opening, that boundary might be:
- a cavity sliding door
- a surface-mounted sliding door
- a pair of curtains
- a full-length thermal curtain
- a noren curtain where gentler separation is enough
The more completely the barrier covers the opening, the more effectively it will slow air movement. A lightweight curtain that finishes well above the floor will provide limited thermal separation, but a heavier curtain extending to the floor and overlapping the sides will generally do more.
A Closed Door Is Only the Beginning
An internal door can be closed and still leak a surprising amount of air. There may be gaps around the sides and top, a large opening underneath or an old latch that does not pull the door firmly closed.
For an important zoning door, consider:
- sealing the gaps around the door jamb
- fitting a suitable bottom-of-door seal
- checking that the door closes properly
- addressing nearby exhaust fans or unused vents
- keeping external windows closed while the room is actively heated or refrigerated-air-conditioned
The objective is not to make the internal door completely airtight. It is to prevent conditioned air from flowing freely into the adjoining space. You will be shocked (!) to know that we have designed a kit to address this specific problem - draught proofing internal doors.
Zoning Is Not a Replacement for Draught Proofing
Zoning manages air movement inside the home. Draught proofing improves the external building envelope by reducing uncontrolled air leakage through external doors, windows, exhaust fans, vents, fireplaces and other gaps.
You need both ideas. A beautifully zoned lounge room will still be uncomfortable if outside air is pouring through gaps around the front door. Equally, a well-draught-proofed home may still waste energy if all the internal doors are open and one heater is trying to warm every room.
Insulation, window protection and external draught proofing reduce unwanted heat flow into and out of the building. Zoning then helps keep the resulting comfort in the part of the home where you want it.
Remember Ventilation and Appliance Safety
Zoning should never interfere with ventilation required for gas appliances or other combustion equipment. Do not seal vents or close a room around an unflued or open-flued gas appliance without professional advice. Evaporative cooling also requires suitable windows or openings to remain open while the system is operating. Australian guidance specifically notes these ventilation exceptions when recommending that doors and windows be closed during heating and refrigerated cooling.
Wet areas must also continue to be ventilated after bathing, showering, washing or drying clothes. The goal is controlled ventilation - not no ventilation.
Keep the Comfort with the People
Zoning is not about closing your home down all year. When the weather is pleasant, open the doors and windows and let the house breathe. When you are paying to heat or cool it, close the boundaries around the area you are using.
Zone out the bathroom and laundry. Close off the unused bedrooms. Stop the hallway carrying warmth away. Do something about the open stairway that is overheating the upstairs bedrooms. The house does not need to be one enormous room all the time.
Keep the heating and cooling with the people - and stop paying to make the laundry, spare room and stairwell comfortable when nobody is there.
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