CONTROL SYSTEMS

CONTROL SYSTEMS

All types of electric resistance heating are controlled through some type of thermostat. Baseboard heaters often use a line-voltage thermostat (the thermostat directly controls the power supplied to the heating device), while other devices use low-voltage thermostats (the thermostat uses a relay to turn the device on and off). Line-voltage thermostats can be built into the baseboard heater, but then they often don't sense the room temperature accurately. It's best to instead use a remote line-voltage or low-voltage thermostat installed on an interior wall. Both line-voltage and low-voltage thermostats are available asprogrammable thermostats for automatically setting back the temperature at night or while you're away.

Baseboard heaters supply heat to each room individually, so they are ideally suited to zone heating, which involves heating the occupied rooms in your home while allowing unoccupied area (such as empty guest rooms or seldom-used rooms) to remain cooler. Zone heating can produce energy savings of more than 20% compared to heating both occupied and unoccupied areas of your house.

Zone heating is most effective when the cooler portions of your home are insulated from the heated portions, allowing the different zones to truly operate independently. Note that the cooler parts of your home still need to be heated to well above freezing to avoid freezing pipes