Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Not really half-ass at all. My brother-in-law is an HVAC guy by trade and has been doing this stuff for around 15 years. He says these are the most energy efficient ways to cool a house. His thoughts are if your use is massive and you need a ton of cooling zones and are prepared for ductwork then that's fine, but if you don't want to rip your house apart these are much better. His big thing now is energy efficiency, so he loves these.
Here's my review after several days playing with them.
We have a 1500 sq foot (not including basement) house, so let's pretend it's 750 sq feet per floor. The bottom floor is one large living room with an open concept kitchen. There's also an office with a single door. Upstairs is two bedrooms on opposite sides of the house with a bathroom in between. It's a traditional cape with a dormer, so you should be able to get some idea.
We got one large head unit in the living room (he said 15, so i'm not sure if that means 15000BTU or some other mysterious convention). We got another smaller one in the bedroom. We plan on doing the other side of the house next year. The bedroom and office are usually not used very often although I game in the office. I was very worried that these two units wouldn't be able to cool our house - our house gets extremely hot and stays hot. The unit outside was also a Mitsubishi and was around 3 feet tall, 2.5 wide, 1 foot deep.
The outside unit is extremely quiet even when the AC units are on full blast. I didn't even know it was on until I stood in front of it and was blasted with hot air. Much quieter than central AC systems you see on people's houses. It only is powering two AC units, so that's the reason, but I was definitely shocked. It's flush with the house so doesn't look so bad. The copper piping was hidden behind some white cases that looked like downspouts from gutters. You can definitely notice them but they are fairly unobtrusive. If I had one complaint about this system I do wish that there was a way to run the pipes through the walls. You probably could, but we didn't feel like tearing up our walls for it.
The living room. My brother-in-law turned it on full blast when he finally installed it. The first thing I noticed was the amount of noise, it was almost as quiet as our ceiling fan. The head unit is controlled by a remote control that also acts as a thermostat for the unit. You simply set the desired temp, times (if you want), direction controls, and fan speed and it will just do what it does. When it was first installed we had it on full blast because the house was around 85 degrees. I would say within an hour we were down to 68 degrees in the living room.
My brother-in-law has a heat sensor gun and was able to measure temps throughout the house. Both the living room AND kitchen read 68. This was something I didn't expect as the kitchen was much further away from the unit. It was impressive. The office was still around 74 degrees, but it was off to the side and through a doorway so not much could be done. The beauty of the remote was you can put it anywhere as long as it can communicate with the unit. I believe it is IR and not RF, so it needs some line of sight. You obviously don't want it in the path of the wind, so we put it directly underneath it. Room thermostat confirms the desired temp was hit.
We left these units on auto and they are super duper quiet. You can barely tell they're on. My house has incredible insulation, so I don't think the units need to work too hard, but even if these did they are quiet as anything. On a side note, we had 30 people over on the weekend in the living room/kitchen and I don't think I heard the unit turn on more than 50% the entire time.
The bedroom unit is much smaller and has less of an area to work with. The upstairs gets exceedingly hot (90+) so I was worried, but again here it sits at 68 degrees. Even the other bedroom is in the low 70's despite only having a small line of sight. For a little unit, it takes care of the entire upper floor.
I don't know what our energy bill will be next month, so that will be the proof. We were running no AC at all, so it will definitely be more, but I'm curious as to how much this unit raises my energy bill.
That's about the best review I can give. If you have any questions I can answer them or ask my brother in law.
FYI, for the two units and the outside compressor it was $3600 in parts for Mitsubishi stuff. He told me the labor would have essentially doubled the price.
