Hi-tech innovations are flooding into every aspect of home building and home improvement. Manipulating your central heating and air-conditioning system to individually heat or cool every room in your house is now as easy as pushing a button. Michael Holigan has a zoning system to show us... That can make every member of your family more comfortable and save you money... About The House.

Jerry Tartaglino (Zoning Expert): A zoning system takes a single central heating and air conditioning system in your home and divides it into multiple zones of control using dampers located in each one of the ducts and a thermostat in each one of the zones, so you get tremendously better comfort control and at the same time you get the ability to set back areas of your home you're not using for energy savings.

Michael Holigan: Some people just use zoning to keep different family members comfortable in separate rooms of the house. But if saving energy is your goal, some studies say you can save as much as 30%. How does the damper actually work inside?

JT: Well, this is what's called a large butterfly damper. The motor is on top. Here's the blade, and I'm going to very carefully open it manually. Now if the thermostat in the zoning system said, "Hey, I'm too warm in this room, send me some cool air." it would, of course, open this damper blade. Air flow would be allowed to pass until, of course, then the thermostat or the sensor said, "I've had enough. I'm cool enough." in which case the zoning system will send a command to shut the damper.

MH: What happens with all the extra air that the unit's trying to push through?

JT: Michael, that's a very often asked question. This device is called a barometric relief damper and it routes from the supply side of your air conditioning unit back to the return air side. So if only one room is calling, what happens is the pressure increases in the system and this door swings open based on how this weighted arm allows it to and so what happens is you start bypassing air from the supply back to the return air side. It's really not wasting air, you end up producing less, but colder or warmer air.

MH: Here on this unit behind us you can see where the air comes out of the top of the unit and it goes to all these ducts with a different zoning dampers on them, but in case they're shut off, it does come right back through here. Here's our barometric pressure valve with a weight on it. It'll open back up and let the extra air come right back into the bottom of the unit again.

I'm Michael Holigan, About the House.