What Are Smart Vents?
When it comes to home automation, one of the more popular options for consumers is the smart thermostat. These devices can be a great addition to your home, giving you more control over heating and cooling to keep the house comfortable while keeping your energy costs in check. Unfortunately, just getting a smart thermostat isn’t going to optimize the heating and cooling of your home without a little more work. The reason for this is that your existing vents are betraying you.
The Problem With Standard Vents
No matter how smart your thermostat is, you’re not going to get even heating and cooling throughout your home unless you can control the temperature in each room that the HVAC system connects to. Some smart thermostats do take this into account, connecting with temperature sensors in each room and adjusting heating or cooling configurations based on the actual temperature across the house, instead of just reading the temperature where the thermostat is located. This doesn’t exactly solve the problem, however, since the thermostat will simply heat or cool until every room reaches a reasonable temperature. Without the ability to actually control airflow in the various rooms separately, there’s not much more that can be done.
Smart Vents
This is where smart vents come into play. Smart vents allow your home’s heating and cooling system to treat each room as a separate climate zone, granting it a much greater amount of control over how much heat or cool air enters the room. Based on the temperature in each of these climate zones, the smart vents can open wider to allow more air to flow through, or close to slow or stop airflow in that zone only. This ensures that no specific area gets too hot or too cold while the thermostat tries to bring everything to an acceptable temperature. Those zones that reach their temperature settings first will simply start to shut off to maintain that temperature, with the smart vents opening back up if the temperature starts to shift again.
Smart Vents and Smart Thermostats
By installing both smart vents and a smart thermostat, you can take a significant amount of control over the heating and cooling of your home. The thermostat and its temperature sensors will control the HVAC unit and optimize heating and cooling to keep you comfortable while also saving you money. The smart vents will make sure that none of that heating and cooling is wasted, controlling airflow to the various zones you’ve set up in your house and helping your system heat and cool both faster and more efficiently. This one-two punch of a heating and cooling solution will finally give you the amount of control that you’d hoped for when you first heard of smart thermostats.
Are Smart Vents Right for You?
Smart vents are ideal for those who want to automate their heating and cooling and save as much money as possible by optimizing their systems. They can make already-efficient systems even more efficient, and if you have issues with certain parts of your home always seeming a bit warm or slightly too cool then they may even be able to fix this problem. With that said, they aren’t for everybody. Those who have little interest in home automation or who have fairly open floorplans with no major temperature differences in the house won’t see nearly as much of a benefit.
Smart Vent Installation
To get the most out of smart vents and the HVAC components that make them shine, it’s important to have them installed by someone who knows what they’re doing. I can connect you with HVAC pros who have experience dealing with smart thermostats, smart vents, and similar smart HVAC devices.
