ENERGY STAR PARTNER

Customizing Your New Home’s Climate

Dear Homeowner,

Congratulations on the purchase of your new home, we hope you enjoy it for many years to come. To maximize your personal comfort, we would like to familiarize you with the basic operation and maintenance of your new central heating and air conditioning system. The basic principle to worry free operation is to keep the system clean by replacing your Return Air Filters regularly and to balance the room airflows to your own personal comfort and lifestyle. For thermostat programming please consult the thermostat manufacturer’s guide provided you in your Welcome Package.

Many components within your home affect the way your cooling and heating system operates during the summer and winter months. The use of lights, computers and other electrical appliances as well as the use of interior doors and window shades can affect the temperature differences between various rooms of your home. Also, outdoor conditions such as wind, heat and direct sunlight can affect temperatures within your home, as can the placement of trees, patio covers and overhangs.

Homes are designed so they can be positioned on any lot within your community. To accomplish this, a California Licensed Mechanical Engineer has designed the HVAC system and equipment to be installed in the home that sits on the lot presenting the most cooling requirements from the heat of the sun. The reason for this is that when you design a home to meet these specifications (i.e. the home that will be the hardest to cool) then all other homes situated on lots offering less heat gains through windows, doors, etc., will have more than adequate cooling and heating equipment capacities to handle their cooling and heating requirements while maintaining the Home Energy Rating your particular home enjoys. For example, if your home has most of its windows facing west, it will require more cooling than your neighbors home which may be rotated 90∞ to either the north or south on another lot within your community. With this in mind, the engineer, hired by your builder, has designed the system to be “free-flowing” in the most energy efficient way possible.

Every effort has been made to make your home environment “move-in ready” however, with differing lifestyles it becomes important that you keep your system operating at peak performance and adjust the comfort of your own home environment by fine-tuning your HVAC system after you have settled in. This needs to be done only if you feel you need more cooling (in summer) or heating (in winter) in one room or another. This is accomplished by what is known as Air Balancing; adjusting the grill face registers throughout the house to maximize the unique comfort of the individual homeowner.Air Balancing is a simple technique that often goes unrecognized by most homeowners primarily because they don’t have detailed information on this subject. As a proactive approach to the comfort and enjoyment of your new home we have created this easy to follow guideline to help you accomplish these adjustments with minimal time and effort.

1. Select the room you want to either cool more in the summer or heat more in the winter.
2. Make sure all supply register vents throughout the house are in the full open position.
3. Open all interior doors leading to all conditioned rooms within your home.
4. Set thermostat to 78∞ for cooling test during summer months, or 76∞ for heating test during winter months.
5. Turn system to “Auto” and keep your house at the set temperature for 24 hours.
6. Identify if indeed that selected room needs more cooling (in summer) or heating (in winter). Do not adjust the supply register vents in that room.
7. Go to the rooms that feel the coolest (during test for summer air-conditioning) or hottest (during test for winter heating). Adjust closed the supply register vents in those rooms by about 25%.
8. Allow another 24hours for home to condition with new settings.
9. If you are satisfied with the newly adjusted airflows throughout the house, you ’re done! You can now adjust, or program, your thermostat to turn on and off at your preset times with your preset temperatures (see mfg guide to programming thermostat). If you are not satisfied with your results, repeat this process from item #3.

Keep in mind that it may take a few times to accomplish your preferred settings, however the results from your efforts will provide you with a more comfortable home based on the way you like to live. It is recommended that you check the balancing of your system each summer and winter season as heat and cooling have different properties, especially in multiple story homes.

The design of your home’s HVAC system was developed to meet a wide variety of homeowner comfort issues and may not exceed everyone’s individual temperature preferences. Every effort has been made to design, install and inspect your system to ensure peak performance and maintenance free operation. Thermostats are located in an area that act as a reference point for the entire system and as such can only give you a balance point to adjust the temperature within the home. By balancing, you should be able to maintain about a 4∞-Fahrenheit maximum temperature differential between the rooms in your house with all interior room doors open. Remember that closing a door to a room or shutting a supply register vent will change the flow characteristics of your home’s environment and can reduce the efficiency and performance of the entire system. However, closing down the supply register vents in high hall or stairway areas may be useful during the winter when heating is required, as hot air will naturally rise to those areas from other places within the house; just remember to open them again when cooling is required in summer.

We hope you enjoy your new home, if you have any questions regarding these procedures please contact your customer service representative.

Customer Service Representative: John Gillet
Tel#: 800-808-7191

Maintaining an Energy Efficient Home