this is our first uh panel discussion about heat pumps so um uh we have a panel of regular homeowners like myself who are not experts at heat pumps who can talk to you about what the experience their experience is for installing heat pumps in their homes all these folks have have worked on that including myself first of off dial back remind you that this is part of the um 2023 uh Denver Metro Green homes tour um the home tour is on the 7th Saturday the 7th um if you haven't done it before great opportunity to get to meet people who have made uh sustainable changes to their home and their lifestyle um and you can talk to people about heat pumps and other things and and kind of Kick the tires and get to know what problems they had and talk to to about what things worked and what things didn't work not only heat pumps but a lot of other things like PV and um and zero escaping and all sorts of other things the way we're going to do this is I'm going to give a little presentation about heat pumps and again I'm not an expert this is completely out of my field I only um kind of geeked out and we were going to put a heat pump system in so I dug around and on the internet and look through some of the government Publications and the and the papers that I could find um and tried to gather information that I think is relevant for people who want to buy heat pump system um so I'm going to talk a little bit about heat pumps and sort of General things and then we're the our panel and myself will talk to you about our experience installing these um there's basically three categories we have one is replacing a forest air system so if you have a furnace that's run by natural gas or propane um replacing that with a heat pump to give you Heating and Cooling the other thing that we're going to talk about is replacing a boiler system so if you have a system where you boil water and you run it through the house how can you replace that with a heat pump we'll talk a little bit about that that's a little more difficult the furnace the forest air system is really straightforward um and then finally uh of course we have some DIY so people have taken on doing this on their own and there's certainly opportunities for that and saving money um so let let's get at it um so this is the title transitioning to cooling or heating um using electricity um or how I came to love ad btic expansion so um hopefully this will become clear to you um for the way I like to think about this is um the the question people always ask is how do these things work why do they when why are they so efficient how do how does heat a heat pump work how can can you get heat out of a cold gas um and and really it's basically possible to get any amount of heat out of uh or to get heat out of any temperature gas it doesn't matter if it's lower than the temperature of the room you're in or really really cold as long as it's gas there is heat involved there is heat in those molecules in the gas they're bumping around if you can cool the gas down and and you can extract in theory heat from any temperature gas now practice it becomes more difficult as you get colder I'll just say that but there is always heat and gas that can be extracted so and and the way you I can think about this the way I like to think about this is if you've ever had a a cylinder of gas or a propane cylinder and um this is to describe the cooling and you open the cylinder up and let the gas flow out you noce the that the handle on the cylinder gets really cold and that's what that expansion that adiabatic expansion is what gives you heat and that's what or that's what gives you that's what cools down the gas and that's part of a heat heat system is an 80b expansion which cools down gas and can cool your room the other part is compressing the gas so you compress the gas so that you can then expand it to get heat out and that compression step also can can drive can make the gas hotter in fact that's how um diesel engines work you'll notice diesel engines don't have spark plugs the reason why they they can still ignite the the gas is because they're compressing the diesel fuel and that that's raises the temperature and ignites the diesel fuel so those are two things you can think about to understand how you get Heating and Cooling heating comes from compression the cooling comes from expansion and those are the two um important parts of a heat pump um so let's look at let's look look at what heat pumping systems look like so as I said you got the important part is you have these two steps a compression and heating so a heat pump system is made out of a compressor and it's also got a system where you do this ad btic expansion so on this in this figure you have one and three one is the compressor three is the expander and then you also have a heat exchanger so or you also have um heat transfer lines so you have lines that carry a fluid from the compressor to the to a heat exchanger that's in your house that allows you to either cool or or heat the house and so you know when you think about these things you're going to have a heater a compressor lines and then a a heat exchanger those are the basic elements of a heat pump system and here's what the the the equipment looks like if you haven't seen it it looks a lot like an air conditioner and that in fact an air conditioner is just a simp a one one-sided heat pump basically you're just doing an expansion you're not you're not using the heating from the from the compression but you've got a thing outside that's what this thing on the right here is on the left that's the compressor and you have and you can see on the right side of that compressor there's little tubes that come out of that and go into the wall those are the those are the transfer lines that take the the Heat or the cool from the compressor and bring it into the building then you have heat exchangers in the middle is a heat exchanger that's used for uh replacing a furnace so a four stair furnace you would put that where the four stair furnace goes um so that's what's called the ducted heat heat pump so it goes It goes through the ducting in your house and provides heat and cooling to the house the second one on the left on the right is what often called the mini split and that's a ductless heat pump and um you have that you may have these sprinkled throughout your house to get the whole house each of these units um can either provide heat or cooling um and again these are just the heat exchangers there's a tube that comes into these things from outside carrying the transfer fluid um so that's basically how these systems work um let's talk a little bit about cost because that's one thing we got really got to think about is cost um so um let's talk about the the actual cost of operating these systems um so this is data that I found online and and it's pretty easy to get um just shows a comparison of heating costs for propane natural gas electric resistance heating this is just where you run electricity through a wire heat the wire up and then heat gas that way um so comparing those three sort of standard um heating processes to heating heat pumps which are shown by the cop 1 two and three and four so the cop is a what's called a coefficient of performance it's an efficiency measurement so um and what that tells you is you put a certain amount of electric energy into your system how much electricity you get or how much heatings do you get back um and those numbers are typically above one so you get more heat out than energy you put into the system and um and you see that for a cop of one you have 100% efficiency a cop of four you have a 400% efficiency you get four four times the amount of energy back that you put in and these are why these things are so efficient is because you have these really high coefficients of performance and you can see that if you compare the cost of running one of these to the cost of running um a standard heating system that at at certain at certain efficiencies you have you get you you you can run it cheaper than you can conventional system so like for cop1 2 um at you can run that cheaper than you can use propane so propane is pretty expensive um and if you have a cop of two or greater you're running at a lower cost than your propane if toop of three you're running a lower cost than natural gas and these are prices local prices they may have changed slightly you know natural gas and stuff are always going up and down so is electricity cost but you got to take those into account you can find these things online and and I can give you help with that if you if you have any questions about that but the point is it's the efficiency that determines um the cost of operation of these things and so what we need to know now is what's the what's the cop as a function of temperature outside because this is the thing that people get hung up about a lot is if it's cold outside how am I going to efficiently heat my house well it turns out they've made a lot of progress in the last few years on making very efficient heat pumps and here's just a couple of um examples of different brands and there and I found this at the Northeast Energy Efficiency group and there's a website down there don't worry I I can give these after the after the presentation um but you can look you can actually look up the measured performance of these of different um different heat pump systems at different temperatures and figure out you know how how much are they going to cost relative to to um usual systems and you can see that these These are um high efficiency or low temp what they call low temperature um heat pumps and you can see that for the Mitsubishi even down to minus 10 you still have a a coefficient of performance um of greater than two and once you get up to 30 or 40° then the coefficient of performance goes way up to three or four for both Brands and they have a bunch of brands on this it's a spreadsheet you can just kind of look this stuff up and kind of figure that out so um so at at at temperatures um above say for instance above um 10 to 20 degrees you know your coefficient of performance is getting to be three and above for some of these heat pumps so that's better than natural gas so just think about it like that if you want so the next thing we need to know is well another thing that that people should probably be aware of is what is the temperature distribution during a year in your house or outside your house um because um if it's always 20 minus 20 below then you know things are a little bit dodg but if it's mostly in the 40s and 50s then you're in you're in prime prime uh territory for these things to work efficiently so what I did was I looked into on a NASA website and I found some information at DIA where they recorded the hourly temperature at DIA um and then summed up all of the temperatures at over the year at at different temperatures so they made a distribution so at 40 degrees it has there's 200 um 200 hours or so that are um that are at that temperature but you can see from this distribution that at those low temperatures there's very very little amount of time at those temperatures so basically even if the efficiency starts to fall off at low temperatures you really shouldn't sweat it because you're you're not going to be spending a lot of time at that temperature right now you don't want your house to freeze so you might want to have some kind of backup in case it does get down to low temperatures and you can um and you can uh you know heat the continue to heat the HS the house and keep pipes from freezing but really um in Colorado the the heat pump is going to be really efficient because you're mostly at these very high temperatures at between 30 and 40 degrees anyway the this these are things to think about you know um what what how much do you really need to worry about these really cold days so how do you estimate the heating need of your house well there's quite a few websites out there that'll allow you to do that um and and really all these things are estimates they depend on insulation Windows um year age of the house a lot of different factors but there are different websites you can try to to make an estimate and I I think it's worth doing that just to kind of figure out what you're and if you have a contractor come in to estimate he'll have his own way of doing that a lot of times this sort of seated the pants they sometimes they do it from satellite and they look at the size of the house and try to figure out what what the heating load's going to be but you can do different things on these some of these websites have you put in more detailed information about walls and and insulation and windows and things like that so okay cost equipment cost so this is the big the big one um so I've read looked at a number of different sites and the cost that I've seen um and again these are I think just sort of global numbers the costs can be between 3,000 and 15,000 depending on a lot of factors depending on how many um how big your house is how many how big of a a heat pump you need and um and um you know any kind of mechanical or electrical there's you know there's a lot of things that go into it the efficiency of the the heater the brand of the heater all those things play a role in the cost of the system um as I said you got you have a compressor you can have one compressor with multiple different um different heat exchangers in the house either ducted or non-ducted so you can put different you can mix and match from what I've seen um uh there's different size heaters they they often rate them as in terms of tons and I think this has to do with the flow of gas that that they use and so a a a high high ton like a five ton um heat exchanger is for a a larger house that requires you know more ptus and a one ton heater is for um for smaller house it depends on the efficiency so there's two there's two there's well there's actually three things that the coefficient of performance that I talked about earlier but there's two sort of seasonally adjusted numbers that people use the Seer and hpsf um and often when you're getting tax breaks um you want to make sure that your equipment meets those requirements because often those tax rebates or have requirements on the these efficiency numbers they give you they give you greater discount ounts for more high high efficient um heat pumps and then brand as I said the brand depend can you know there's some brands that are more expensive than others and that may be because of quality I don't know um installation you might have to get you know there's two things you I there's probably more but two things I think are important electrical and mechanical so for electrical you may have to you're probably going to have to run lines electrical lines you might have to change your service you might have to um you know add Breakers to your system you'll probably have to add Breakers to your your electrical system um and and those can those can be pretty expensive but there are actually tax rebates for that so so take a look at that I think those come from those tax you do get tax credits and you might get some um rebates depending upon your utility and your local government and then there's Mo mechanical um modifications that might need need to be made to your house to bring in the lines to um to site the compressors and to figure out how many compressors and if you're doing a forest air system you might have to do some or you're doing some kind of ducted system you might have to put in some ducting so just be aware that there's there may be mechanical costs too and then of course in um but but but then there also the possibility for um for uh tax credits and rebates and I've listed a couple of websites that I thought were pretty interesting about the the cost of these systems so there those are things that you can check out to get kind of a a handle on that um okay this is probably one of the more recent one of the more recent things and maybe more important things is what are the rebates and credits and there's a lot of them out there right now it's a good time to buy heat pumps as you may have heard um and there's a lot of money available from the federal government from the state um and even from utilities and local governments um and I've listed some of this information there's a uh there's a flyer on the table that has this information in it basically um and a a poster that describes not just heat pumps but also um rebates and tax credits that are available for PV systems and other Energy Efficiency changes you want to make your house uh so um I guess the one thing that that um I think um I kind of wanted to go through was how you might prepare for doing a heat pump first thing I think and most important is make sure that your insulation is optimized um you want to have um you'll be you'll be wasting a lot of energy and money if you have a nice heat pump system but your house is not well insulated so look into that that's actually a much cheaper way to save money and energy is to get your house well insulated um so that's really highly recommended plus there's tax breaks for that too um and and credits so go ahead and you know make sure that your your house is has high performance in terms of insulation and leakiness um before you jump in with a heat pump power you're going to need to have um as I they said you're going to need to have power usually these things run on 220 um and they can use up to require the compressors can require up to 60 amps so you you need a pretty sizable amount of power make sure that's on your panel or if not you you know you might have to get a service change which again I said can be covered by some tax or can be um not covered but you can get some tax rate to help help with that cost um the the type of heating system that you're going to need need um depends on what what you have in your house now so in in the house that I'm going to talk about and um is uh it was forced air and so it was a really simple job taking the furnace out putting in an heat pump pretty straightforward hydronic system if you have a boiler that becomes more complicated um if you want to just add heating or cooling to your house you can use these Mini Splits and that may be a good um a good uh change for hydronic hydronic systems where you have a boiler the problem in this country apparently is that the the boiler the temperature they make hydronic heat pumps but the temperature only goes up to like 120 or 140 from what I've told um and you and most of the existing heating elements around your house are designed to work at 140 or 160 and so that temperature Gap can make those less efficiency L less efficient now I've heard that they're working on this and they may be coming up with a heat pump that is um can work at higher temperatures so that may be coming down the line so for those of you who have hydronic systems you might be able to wait out and get a better system backup it's really important to have backup like I mentioned if the temperature does drop you don't want your pipes to freeze so you want to have that backup although you know I don't think it'll be used used a lot contractors get multiple beds um you know there there's a lot of contractors out there um and some of them charge a lot of money so just be aware of that um and then finally if you're interested in Net Zero you know you might want to plan your PV system or or use Community or solar Gardens um that's I should say solar Community Gardens or systems that can can provide you with green electricity this is going to be all run by electricity um and then finally um I just wanted to say that uh this is addressing potentially big big problem um or a big um carbon impact housing house heating is is responsible for um 400 over 400 million tons of carbon dioxide emission um and we can all do our part to reduce that um and as I said you can pretty easily make your house a um Net Zero by having your own energy source um so that's basically all the Talking I have again I'm not an expert I just learned stuff by digging around the web reading some P papers and reports and actually having a system install at my house um first of all um let me just give the the panel a chance to see if there's anything that they wanted to say about um about heat pumps in general uh yeah so I have a I believe for Colorado the standard is a low temperature heat pump but not a Subzero and I've had mine about a year so I went through those two weeks we had of you know between zero and 20 last winter uh and it ran constantly but it did fine because I had asked I used one of the kind of third party overall electrification contractors for my system I'd asked about supplemental resistance heat with the heat pump systems and the air handlers if you're replacing a forc air system you can actually get I mean it's like a space heater where you're just running you know electricity through a wire but they install it as part of the air handler as a backup heat and they did not recommend that for here so I'm in gold and I'm like five minutes away so apple wood yeah um so I I did fine last winter just with the heat pump and you know you might want to have a electric alternative for when the power goes out but that's true for a gas furnace as well yeah so I don't know the contractor I worked with did not recommend necessarily the builtin supplemental heat for the system that I got but they did recommend you know if it does get really really cold you can do a space heater or something to supplement yeah my our forest air system was we had a forest a propane heat system and they replaced that with a with a heat pump and then right on top of it and I'll show you in the picture there's a little backup resistive Heating and so if it if the temperature gets too cold that the heat pump is not working as efficiently it'll just turn that on automatically and you won't even notice it we haven't we haven't actually run it in the winter so I I don't have the winter experience but that's what they claim the so you have any Heats is that what you're nope I don't have any resistant heat built in just the heat P usually they recommend the heat p they didn't for me yeah so even if it gets below 24 because our we're insulating the house because the system's still running we won't freeze we just like might need to put a jacket on um kind of thing so we really expect that yeah even if at 10 degrees or 0 degrees we should be able to keep our house at 6570 you just can't do that once you get below 24 negative 24 is all respect to Fahrenheit not although they're getting pretty close uh we're we have Mitsubishi so I live in a 1960 Applewood Hutcherson Ranch uh I did not do the Practical thing and insulate first because when I bought the house the heater and the water heater were on their last legs I was living on borrowed time so I wanted to replace both of those before they died and before it was an emergency so I actually kept my house warm through that last winter no extra resistive heating with 1960s insulation so it can be done uh so on the left is the initial setup I have a partially unfinished basement so it's kind of just a for aair heater and then the water heater is right next to it and then there was air conditioning at the house with the condenser outside and on the right you can see the replacement system um I had mixed experiences with the installation it should be one for one with a forest air system um but part of the package included a very large filter system which uh I did come to appreciate during Wildfire season there's a very Hefty filter system that this contractor installed however that was not part of the uh installation As I understood it and I never received any spec drawings so I think uh they saw this giant open room and we're just like well we'll just put it in however we need uh I do have plans to finish the basement someday and they had initially installed the air filter right where my walkway was going to be where the hallway was going to be so uh things did have to get rebuilt so I think that's my largest piece of advice is if you're retrofitting really work with your installer your contractor or yourself whoever it is to make sure you have a game plan for the ancillary equipment right the the air handler for the heat pump is the same size as my my old furnace was but sort of all the the ducting and the filtration and stuff added a lot of volume that wasn't really accounted for um because there appeared to be a lot of space I think actually if you were working in someplace like a utility closet and they're confined it would have been less of an issue but that's my number one tip is uh get asilt draw or get spec drawings to see how it's actually going to get installed so I think I'm actually next I'll talk about about our system this is a system that was um installed in a house in Howard Colorado so it's pretty cold up there but not not that much colder than than Denver um it was it's a 2006 year old H or 2006 house um so it had pretty good insulation um but this is a picture of the wall before and after we added the compressor and you can see the the black lines those are the the um fluid containing lines um and that's kind of this is a 4ton uh compressor so it's a pretty good size one um this is a picture of the inside our utility room showing before and after and we replaced our water heater also I'll tell you a little bit about that but this is the this is the furnace that was in there um and then they just replaced it with this and right up at the top here is the electric supplementary heater so that that's a a separate system didn't cost all that much um and just put it on there you don't have to worry about it what's that so you have the heat yeah right um right right and um and you can see that these are the pipes that came through the wall for the exhaust from the furnace and from the heat from the the water heater of course those are gone we have to fix those but all you have is these black lines coming from the compressor for the furnace the water heater uses the air that's in the room so this is one thing I would recommend you look at is it turns out it gets really cold down in there when when when the water heater's running I'm not sure how efficient the water heater is but um it gets really cold down there so we're looking at putting in a vent to vent the air the exhaust from the water heater outside just so the room doesn't get so cold I know there's um yeah I don't know that's one I'm just starting to look at this I'm not sure but that's one thing you have to worry about is if you're going to suck air from the house to for the water here you're going to be pulling air in through the rest of the gaps in the house and and I don't have anything to report I just started looking at this go ahead no actually they didn't I don't think they had to do much at all they just I didn't actually see them I wasn't there when when they did it but it looks pretty similar um I think they had to do some work down here in the bottom but it looks like they maybe took off some of the some of the um duct work to to fit in the the heat pump but I don't think they had to do a lot of work yeah so we had a fun story so our our house is from 67 uh the boiler was about 35 years old and we were spending I don't know how much money on propane that we ended up just to save costs we're keeping our house at about 60° 55 in the basement cuz we're just like we're just tired of it and so we started planning with the company on how to get rid of it and switch everything over and of course you know two months later in the middle of the winter in January our boiler dies so our boiler uh and the old systems are here um our boiler fed the baseboard heat for the entire house um as well as our hot water so we had a small hot water tank on that it also fed and yeah the whole thing just just died um apparently was like way over siiz as well and super inefficient yeah yeah it's 3,400 ft uh it's a it's a I don't know a ranch with the walk out basement um brick uh kind of thing yeah so yeah we then stopped all conversations with this company not about we stopped conversations about replacing the system and said we just need to take hot showers right so that was the first thing we did my wife and I were going to the rock climbing gym for two weeks that's where we took showers um we had plug-in heaters from the neighbors and then yeah we we s with the the heat pump water heater um I think Kelsey and uh well Kelsey I think you have the same one I do AO Smith I saw in the picture um and we just went with the biggest size 80 gallon because it's like a $200 difference um the install is all the same price and then now there's actually people in our well not in our house right now but we've had a flurry of contractors um I think six people are there today nine people are supposed to be there tomorrow and we are now installing an entire mini split system um Mark mentioned there are no heat pumps in America that can just rrit for baseboard Heats uh heaters I think it's in Finland they created it they're starting to do some trials in the UK and America we'll get them in like 10 years it's just we're so far behind um so yeah we're doing 10 mini splits um on the main floor there'll be flat Reg in the ceiling um so then they actually stuck up into the attic and then uh in the basement which I have a picture of it being installed um they'll be the wall units um yeah and I think it's it'll end up being the like Mark's unit outside will have two of those so two double Stacks um yeah I don't know I don't know what else to say we're doing a whole retrofit so it's everything um brand new electrical panel we have to double the size of it bring new we have to move the power um we're we did the full blower door test and everything like that so we're going to double the insulation in the Attic then they're going to do another blower door test and walk around the house and do air sealing finding all of the gaps and doing all of that um and yeah so we're just going to like super insulate the house and then they're adding on an Erv as well this week um and so that will exchange the the bad air or whatever you want to call it for clean air and bring the cleaner through a filter and with the Erv it'll try to exchange the Heat or the cold so you're not using some of that so yeah it's been a fun week yeah uh 85,000 I think um so we we were going through all the rebates we're using uh elephant energy at a boulder um they're kind of operating like a startup now uh it's it's been really fun um but yeah I think the to get rid of the system and do the hot water heater was something like 10 to 12 um I think the Mini Splits cuz we're doing 10 units two outdoor units those are like 45 and this is all including installation cost everything and then everything else on top of that is new electrical installation all that kind and the Erv and all that oh and we're doing a humidifier uh as well so yeah that 85,000 after Reb no I think it's before yeah and so they're they're doing really good they're helping us with the rebates that they can do ahead of time like through Excel and everything and then they're helping us with all the paperwork for um when we do our taxes yeah yeah and the rebates it's nice working with a company uh I know some of these people did DIY and they'll talk about that but a company will walk you through all that yeah how loud is the it's not loud at all um we do have our like I guess gym hangout area is right next to it and there's this big grill in the wall cuz that's where the boiler was pulling the air and was just from our house even with like standing right next to that it just sounds like a Fan's running and that's it so any other room you don't hear it is it really worth trying to salvage have a hybrid system gas I'll hand the mic over to some of you know you all as well for us the reason it was cost effective is a new boiler costs like $35,000 already so like that immediately was in propane we're spending 4,000 plus a year um so we're going to pay off this in uh I don't know like five to 10 years hey there so I'm Jay Schubert and um we live in Golden in a 2900 Square fot house that was built in 1969 with a walkout basement and we've been in that house about almost six years now and when we moved in we had um a swamp cooler for cooling and the house has a boiler and we're on propane and really what we did was at a certain point it was actually two years ago when the wildfires were really bad when the smoke was really getting us we and we really loved using our our swamp cooler you know having having the windows open being able to you know cool the house pretty quickly with a swamp cooler the problem with it was that it was you know it occupied a whole room basically our swamp cooler was in the room that I used as an office and so you couldn't be in that room the thing was so big you know it was a box this size you know and the air pressure that would come from that thing meant you couldn't really even be in that room effect ly and you had kind of a cold one cold part of the house and it pushed nice cool air out through the whole house when you had the windows open but it was um uneven you know in the way that it cooled the house and when we started getting Wildfire smoke we realized well you have to draw air in through the swamp cooler and so we're pulling smoke into our house if we want to be cool so we had to choose between you know choking on smoke or or being cool and that was when I decided it was time to do something else about you know air conditioning and really for me what I decided to do was try to do it entirely myself and um what I found was um so I ended up with two units and I found them on Amazon I think I spent for the the unit that's in our living room here I bought this for $1,800 on Amazon it's a DIY unit um I have one that's very similar a little bit smaller in our bedroom so we have two units that one was about $1,700 and each one of them I installed in an afternoon and probably the hardest part of it or the scariest part of it was drilling a 3-in hole you know in my house through the brick and into the you know into the living room you know trusting that this is going to work out and the thing was going to fire up and work because the way that the DIY systems work is that you know you get this the line set that comes with them is is coiled up and it's pre-pressurized right normally when you install a system you have to have a technician come and draw down the lines and pull pressure you know um but the way these these systems work is the lines are pre-pressurized and basically you hook them up you open a valve you hear and it's connected right and so basically I spent you know very a very small amount of money to get air conditioning in our house and so this does the entire upstairs so our bedroom's upstairs this is our living room upstairs um our unit outside you can see that I you know kind of put some you know they came with some uh conduit to cover the the line set you know and I feel like I was able to install it pretty cleanly um in an afternoon each one um so between that you know what I spent buying them on Amazon and a little less than $200 for an electrician to wire up the two connections I needed um I have air conditioning and um we don't really we do use them a little bit for heat you know so we kind of supplement the heat with them in the in the in the winter but um I think we were able to pull this off for a very small amount of money to get air conditioning and we still have that you know swamp cooler installed and one of these days I'm probably going to pull it out because it's just actually kind of rotting the window that's it's sitting below you know um but this has really allowed us to have a very you know house that cools off very quickly we only use it upstairs the downstairs never gets hot enough that we need air conditioning down there um and so this has been a really great solution for us that was very inexpensive very simple to install and you know is incredible efficient so we're really happy with what we did so you have a gas F we do yeah yeah so we're still running on propane and you know in the winter we turn on the you know we turn these guys on and get a little supplemental heat but they're actually not you know because of the baseboard heat we have in addition to we have um uh heated floors you know under our tile uh electric heat um between that and these you know we wouldn't be able to rely on these alone for heat because you know they would heat they don't heat evenly right right so we would need a lot more if we wanted to have complete coverage of our house for heat but for air conditioning uh we were able to get away with a pretty cheap simple install question did you use a Mr cool yeah so Mr Cool is the brand yeah on eBay they're about $2,500 now yeah so now you can get these for closer to yeah 24 2500 depending on the size you know I didn't it was so cheap I didn't even look like think about looking into it I was just like wow that was amazing that was super easy it was an afternoon project boom done and I hadn't even looked into rebates yeah let me take over yeah CA because we're talking Mr Cool and um I have some uh Mr Cool handouts here I didn't think any many people would want to do DIY but um I uh I think with Jay I think it's a very reasonable solution for cooling so my house is uh unusual in that it's a a passive solar bmed from the North Highly uh insulated home so my heating and cooling needs are extremely low compared to a normal house and I didn't have cooling for a long time and recommended I was trying to get my floors to cool with a chill I couldn't I couldn't figure it out so um so this is Mr Cool's system and I bought mine in 2019 and it was about $1,800 and uh I got mine from um uh supply house which is a heating and cooling online uh vendor I got a lot of stuff from supply house over the years uh this is my hole in the wall so I didn't have to do three Ines but it's about uh maybe two and a half uh going through Uh Wood beam and uh in hard U ISO poly isopropyl I don't know insulation and here's my unit being installed um I uh utilize the top of the refrigerator as my platform and um I uh I ran my pipe not directly through the wall but they gave you like 16 or 18 ft of pipe so I brought it all the way in and put it in a recommended spot which is up high because I have a high ceiling uh and of course the heat rises so it's up high in my in my kitchen and that's the only room that I use supplemental Cooling in um the rest of the house doesn't get much more than 75 and so uh this one has all the passive solar and tends to get hotter especially in the uh late summer when the sun is really low so um this this was the outside unit I had I didn't have a full picture of the outside unit but mine is uh 115 volt and I did have an electrician put in the lines it's a 20 amp circuit it can run on a 15 amp circuit uh and it's dedicated uh however I would have put in a 220 line if I wasn't already working with 115 and a DIY system that I couldn't get to work that I bought on Craigslist so and at one point um I don't think oh this picture you can see there's a lot of wetness at the bottom of this uh uh at the bottom of the uh uh evaporator inside what happened is uh my pipe that goes outside sunk and um my condensate was not going outside how it's supposed to it was backing up into the uh unit and that was making it sweat and so I'm still dealing with that because that kind of made a board go out so I had to replace the logic board and I'm telling you Mr cool they are so good you know it's a couple years later uh it's a fiveyear uh on Parts all I had to do was uh submit an online uh request they sent me an email said what do you need uh they had me test the outside unit they gave them a code that told me we needed a new logic board and I took the thing apart and replaced it I mean it's and I'm not you know I'm pretty good but but that's pretty Advanced uh maintenance uh for just a homeowner do it yourself so I was able to do that and now it's operating again so uh I still have to worry about my condens it because I had a HVAC guy come in he put in a pump to pump the condens it out and it looks like it went out after a about of year so going to have to figure out that I think I might have to rerun my line into the bathroom drain instead of into the uh washing machine drain but um normally you run it back outside but uh I I I didn't have a big enough hole in my in my wall so I don't know if you have any questions but um if you are interested in DIY um Mr Cole does uh make it super easy with the their with their pre-charged lines there may be other brands that are coming out with pre-charged lines but this is a well warranted system if you ask me great questions it's for our 410 uh that's the most recent uh least uh least uh it's R22 is worse and R5 is worse but they have some that are coming out with CO2 I can't wait I mean that wouldn't that be cool you use carbon dioxide as the a coolant in your in your uh in your refrigeration system mitsubisi has one but it's only for industrial it's big it's a big system and there's a system called architect in Canada and they may have one uh that that the the problem is they requireed indoor uh tank and I have gas instant water heater and boiler and what my floor is heated with pecs and so and I need so little gas um probably my highest gas amount that I use in a very cold winter is 80 80 therms I don't know if you know how low that is but that's pretty low and in the summer we only use four or five so um replacing mine with an electric system it's hydronic it's going to be a little more difficult than people who have forced air any other questions just comment on my experience with Mr that it is very quiet I actually can barely can barely hear the unit when it's when it's on you have to really kind of Put Your Head Up by it to hear it so the indoor unit is really really quiet if I had one thing to do over I think with the way the way I installed my bedroom unit um is that I mounted it on the outside wall of our house with some brackets and the fan on the condenser is really not well balanced it's a pretty cheap fan it's plastic and that thing wobbles and when it's if it's not properly you know isolated you can it you can hear it kind of vibrating the house and it drives me nuts and I've recently been messing with it and I gotten it pretty quiet but like I think that if I had it to do over again I would figure out a better place to sit it the one that's for our living room sitting on a concrete slab outside totally dead silent you don't hear it at all the one in our bedroom I think if I could do it differently I would have set it somewhere um or just put a little bit more into the setup so was a little more adjust with some more padding on it because uh you know you don't want to you don't want to hear it wir and you got a Mr Co system do they also promoted as a Mr war or would you just I mean there's no reason you couldn't so it it Heats just fine it Heats great but I don't I don't not I don't think oh okay yeah mine mine definitely puts out heat and it's just that one instead 2 okay yeah I have a one of mine is a 230 volt the big one in the living room and then I have a 120 in the in the bedroom and they both definitely do heat M um but and we have an open plan kind of dining room living room kitchen area and that area will heat really well but you know I don't have a head in the office and the other you know the bathroom so like it's not practical to rely on it entirely so we do you know supplement our baseboard heaters with it but it's you know I think you'd have to have several units if you really wanted to rely on it for heat in each room hi okay so I have central air so I guess that's what you call it right um so why would you do a minl design in kind of connected to that question I was just curious if there's any way to solve an issue where somebody in the basement wants more heat than yeah but I think maybe yeah so uh I mean I think the Mini Splits you would go all mini splits if you're placing a boiler or something if you have ducting and the ducting is fairly good you'd want the air handling unit um so I actually also have a mini split head I have a hybrid system with the air handler and I got a a a mini split head so I have a ceiling cassette in the living room and it was because my living room was always freezing cold in the winter didn't matter how much I turned up the heat living room was just always freezing cold so when they were designing my system again kind of pre- insulation as a quick replacement not emergency replacement uh I added a ceiling cassette so a mini split for the ceiling and so that's a really good option you can have both you can do a four stair replacement which is the air handler and then if you have a room that you want cooler or hotter you can add a mini split if you want uh it turned out when they came to install my system the mechanical guy who came was really good and he figured out that the dampers were turned on all the vents into my living room and that's why it was always cold uh so I probably didn't need a mini split but I have it now uh and it's nice cuz in so in the winter I can keep the rest of the house cool and since I spend the majority of my time kind of in the living area I'll just turn on the mini split uh so I can have some more Focus heating so it it does offer some flexibility so you can have both um so you could kind of do purposely what happened to me accidentally you could you know vent turn turn down some of the vents uh using the dampers to areas you wanted to heat or cool separately with the mini split I don't know how recommended that is from an HVAC system point of view though I will say it's not efficient it's not good lots lots of questions out there come to the tour you can you can see these things in real life and um Kick the tires and uh and we're still looking for volunteers is that right right if you want to volunteer you can hang out at a house with uh with the and and talk to the owner there too
