LESLIE: Alright, now we’ve got Bob who needs some help with a central air question. How can we help you today?
BOB: Yeah, hi guys. Listen, I have a ranch-style home. I have one-zone air conditioning and it’s a three-bedroom house. And everyone else has moved out and I’m just wondering is there any way to split that so it would be able to just cool my bedroom at night and save me a little money and be more efficient.
TOM: So you want to cool just your bedroom at night but everything else during the day?
BOB: Yeah, yeah. (inaudible at 0:15:11.8)
TOM: Well, you’d have to put – you could put motorized dampers on it and control those with a zone control so that it would basically be timed to only cool one area of the house then close those ducts off, cool another area of the house. But frankly, by the time you get through the expense of putting all those in, you could also have the ducts split by an HVAC contractor and add a second air conditioning compressor for the same kind of money.
What I would suggest you do is if you have bedrooms that you’re not using right now, there are probably some manual dampers in the duct system that should be turned off to those rooms because you definitely don’t need to cool those rooms.
BOB: Right. OK. So the effective way would probably – or cost effective is to get a guy in and just get a small unit to do the one bedroom for the nighttime.
TOM: Yeah, you know what you might want to do is to get a split ductless system. It’s basically like having a whole-house air conditioning system except it’s designed for one small area. You have a compressor outside and you have an air handler unit that hangs on the wall inside. It’s much quieter, too, than a traditional window unit and less expensive than a full-fledged second zone.
TOM: Yeah, it’s so quiet. We have a Fujitsu split ductless in our radio studio and nobody can hear it when we have all the microphones on.
BOB: Alright, that’s great. That sounds like an answer to my problem then and save me a few dollars on the long run and save a little bit …
TOM: Yeah, that’s probably a better solution than trying to get into installing zone controls.
BOB: OK, that sounds good.
TOM: Alright.
BOB: I appreciate the advice.
TOM: You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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