What a Five-Zone Boiler Means for a Grand County Winter

A heating zone is one area of a home with its own thermostat and its own call for heat. A boiler with five zones can warm the kitchen and living area on a Tuesday night while the guest rooms stay low. Rebecca Smyth, Real Estate Agent, gets asked about this a lot, because heat is one of the biggest questions in a Grand County home.

Winters here are long. Many homes in Grand Lake, Granby and Fraser are second homes that sit empty during the week, and plenty of full-time homes have rooms nobody uses every day. Heating every room to the same temperature all the time is the expensive way to do it. Zones are how you stop paying to heat space you are not standing in.

A boiler heats water. The hot water travels through pipes to baseboard units along the walls of each room, and the room warms from the floor level up. There is no blower and no ducts, so it is quiet and there is no dry blast of air.

The zones are separate loops of that piping. Each loop has its own thermostat and its own valve. When one room calls for heat, only that loop opens, and the boiler only works as hard as it needs to. Compare that with one thermostat for the whole house, where the hallway thermostat decides how warm the bedroom gets.

A high-efficiency boiler uses less gas to make the same heat. That is worth asking about with any boiler, because it shows up in the winter utility bill every month.

Take 1369 GCR 64 in Grand Lake. It runs on a high-efficiency boiler on natural gas with baseboard heat in five separate zones. On top of that, there are two fireplaces, one gas fireplace in the living room and one in the primary suite, and together they heat the whole house well.

Five zones plus two fireplaces is a useful pairing for a house with five bedrooms and an upper-level bonus room. When the family is home, you open up the zones. When it is just two people, you keep the main living area and the primary suite warm and leave the upstairs on a lower setting.

It is the same idea I use when I picture a client in a house: how many people are here at once, and which rooms do they actually use? Heat should follow the answer.

Low, not off. In a mountain winter the goal for an empty room is to keep it above freezing with a margin, so pipes in the walls do not freeze and the house does not take a long time to recover. Most people set an unused zone somewhere in the 50s. The right number depends on the house, the weather and what a heating professional tells you about that specific system.

If you are leaving a second home for a few weeks, ask the seller or a local heating company how they set the house up when it is empty. Every system is a little different, and the person who has lived with it knows its habits.

Ask these at the showing, or have me ask for you.

• How old is the boiler, and when was it last serviced? A service record is a good sign. No record is worth noting.
• Which rooms are on which zone? Walk the house and find each thermostat. You want to know that the zones match how you would use the home.
• What fuel does it use? Natural gas, propane and electric all cost different amounts, and not every Grand County street has natural gas.
• What did the heating season cost? Ask for last winter's utility bills. I will ask for them on any home you are serious about.
• What happens in a power outage? Many boilers need electricity to run the pumps, even when the fuel is gas. A fireplace that works without power is a real benefit.
• Is there anything the inspector should look at closely? Add the boiler to your inspection list, and ask a heating company to look at it if the inspector recommends it.

Details on the boiler at 1369 GCR 64, such as brand, model and year installed, are still being collected from the sellers, so ask me for the latest before you rely on them. The zone count and the two fireplaces come from the sellers and from the photos, and a home inspection is the place to confirm how the system performs. This post is a general guide to heating in a Grand County home and not advice on any one system.

Thinking about a home with a boiler and baseboard heat? Here is how buying works in Grand County, and you can book a call with me or text 970-531-1268 and we will go through the heating questions on the homes you like.