How-To: MRCOOL DIY Mini Split Installation (Step by step) / Garage has A/C!

it is hot ah yeah hello is this mr. cool yeah man listen I need I need some help here yeah yeah oh yeah okay so in this video we're gonna cover the install of this mini-split system from mr. cool it is a DIY system meaning no HVAC professional has to come out to your house to help you out with the install it comes with an easy to connect pre-charged line set so you just hook up this guy which goes outside to this guy which goes inside do a little bit electrical work and you are up and running with heat and a/c in your garage okay so no more heat humidity and mosquitoes during summer months and I'm super excited to get this installed so let's get started with the unboxing okay so this is the inside unit it's pretty small so this is awesome so I'll go ahead and put it back in the box here's the wall template remote and instructions so here's the line set is the pre-charge line set quick couplers or adjustable wrench only is needed so that's pretty cool put that aside too for the condensate the thing that plugs through the wall okay so we'll leave it on this styrofoam head for now we'll just move it aside over here we got a line set cover kit okay so there's cover up to 12 feet of line on the exterior and according to these instructions this is paintable and I will paint it because my garage is brown and red okay next up got a little thermostat that we can hang on the wall it's good with Alexa and Google assistant so that's awesome right for my phone I've got a nice mr. cool tool bag two adjustable wrenches for the light set and then we got a three and a half inch hole saw over here we got a little plastic pad in case I want to put it on the ground I'm not sure if I want to hang it or put it on the ground but we'll go over that when we go over the planning of the install ok I want to talk for a minute about sizing of the unit the unit I got is 18 KB to you and they make a 12 18 at 24 and I think a 36 and probably some others but anyway on their website they have some general sizing requirements for example 12,000 unit is good for 500 square feet ok I went slightly larger this garage is about 480 square feet but the reason I went with a little more BTU for more cooling is because my garage has an open ceiling okay so the rafters are like this the ceilings like this all the rafters I would say 80% of it is insulated however that's a lot more area or space to cool also my walls are cinder block the r-value on cinder block is like 1 per inch of block thickness okay so the walls aren't insulated that well also the front garage door is wood that is not insulated that well the seals around the garage door aren't the best so there's some leakage in this space and most importantly is I'm not going to be running this a/c 24/7 I'm gonna flip it on an hour to before I come out here so I need a little more cooling to help speed things up so that was my thought process in 18k sizing okay and a huge thanks to mr. cool for sponsoring this video if you want to see all the products tools parts and whatnot links will be in the video description and in the blog post in the upper right okay so let me do a quick panoramic view of my garage so you can see right there is the electrical panel I have some free wall space right there and then you can see I have the template taped up there because that's I think I'm gonna put it okay not much room above the window no room there and we don't have room anywhere else so obviously the easiest thing to do would be to put it right there however I'll show you why because the condenser would be on the outside and a non optimal space so what I'm thinking is put the air handler inside unit right there the line set will run down and across the outside and the condenser will go outside there so we'll go outside and take a quick look all right so you know here's the Patty or whatever I didn't want to put the condenser right here because you'll see it and you'll hear it but the electricals right there so that would be a very easy spot and the line set would just run straight down but what I'm gonna do here okay so back here that piece of tape that that blue masking tape you see there's where the hole would be where the template is placed inside so that would be the hole I would have a vertical run of the line set and then it would transition to horizontal somewhere in this space here all the way across and then the condenser outside unit would go right here now I think I'm gonna put it on a wall bracket and it'll be mounted up like this a lot of water comes through here when it rains a lot it's a little slightly sloped down so I don't want I don't want it to get wet so this is in a spot where you can't see it it's on the side of the garage in between the small space here I think it'll do alright and the line set obviously I'll paint the plastic pieces to match this color I'll probably repaint this whole wall the same color just to freshen it up redo the gutter and it should look pretty good okay so I have the template up this is the rough location where it's gonna be and it's dictated by where I put this hole and I'll explain that in a second but per the instructions I have more than the clearance required to the top of the ceiling I have more than enough clearance on the sides per the instructions and to the floor so I meet all that criteria now what I want to do with this hole here is if I take this guy down this is cinder block okay and if you ever looked down in an a cinder block that's not installed there's a web right here in the middle and at the end so in here is hollow and I want to make it easy on myself and I just want to drill through a hollow section of the block okay and I've cord through this garage for electrical service in the past so I know that this is hollow all the way through so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put this guy right here and I'm just gonna trace around it and the center is summer right there okay next problem I don't have a coring bit exactly three and a half inches I think I have two and a half or two and five-eighths I'm renting a hammer drill from a friend I went to the home-improvement store and I asked to see what sizes they have they have like two and five-eighths again and then it jumps to 4-inch so that doesn't do me any good so what I think I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drill a bunch of small holes around the perimeter okay and then I can bust this out with a demolition hammer okay also I have a carbide blade for my saws ah and I did a little googling and those blades will cut through cinder block obviously it wears it out fast but if I have some jagged edges I can easily do that with the with the bit okay so that's the plan [Music] [Music] well I'm through but man I hit the web I think this block actually has two webs but right here on the left here I'm right up against another web so unfortunately I need to go through a web here which is fine at least I'm through one wall I have a chisel tip on a hammer drill and I can just bust up that web but what I want to try to do is poke a hole through the other side here slightly down from this hole so I can get a little bit of a slope to the to the pipes okay this piece of tape is here I mark the center of this hole and I went down slightly about half an inch and this is where I'm gonna poke a pilot hole through the other side Wow I'm eyeballing it at this point [Music] alright I'm through the other side so we'll go outside and punch the hole [Music] [Music] okay so this whole saw went through that much cinderblock and it's it's still a little sharp obviously this isn't the correct tool but it works I have that wall to that rib to deal with let me show you what a property looks like this is a coring tool for a hammer drill and this is specifically made for cinderblock concrete brick whatever unfortunately I don't have three and a half inch called around no store has it these bits are hundred to two hundred three hundred dollars depending on which one you buy so I didn't buy one and so anyway here's what a core bit looks like so now with that web what I'm going to be doing is using this hammer drill in chisel mode and I have a chisel and I'm just gonna pick away at that web until that grommet fits that's the plan alright so my camera won't go any higher but you can see this is what I'm dealing with here in order to get this guy in here just gonna have to start chiseling away at that until I get a clear opening so we'll see how quick that goes [Music] all right it fits that was actually much easier than I thought the chisel made quick work of that all right what I'm going to do now is use a sawzall with the carbide blade and I'm just going to put a little bevel on the backside of here so I can get the pipe to go down okay so this sleeve is all the way through the wall there's about half an inch protruding on the other side so what we can do is trim it and then put that other cuff on the other side okay so you can see I have the template here I cut the hole out I'm lining the hole up and I have a level so that's pretty level right there fine-tune it in a second okay so here's the metal plate obviously you'll be able to read the numbers that's the way you want to put it and the arrows pointing up and you want to just set it right on the outline of the template here so what I'll do is I'll put one hole in level it out with the other [Music] so these are the wall anchors supplied in the kit drawn my second hole get it nice and level here all right so that's nice and level and it's time to go ahead and mount the unit okay so here we are at the unit it's in the box this is the top and this is the bottom what we need to do is bend this piping to over here this is where it comes out the hole and we also need to orient these pipes in a certain manner wrap it with tape before we hang it and feed it through the wall okay so let's go ahead and these are the refrigerant lines let's go ahead and nice and easy bend these okay we got our kind this is for the kind and sit okay so the refrigerant lines are right here there's one here and one here got that here's the condensation and then the signal wire goes up here so that's how we're going to bundle it alright so let me get started here okay I'm gonna put a zip tie here just to make life a little a little easier on me okay okay I'm gonna move my zip tie down here get a little tighter so that's all packaged nice all right we can lift this guy out of the box and carry it over there all right first things first take your signal wire and just feed it outside okay time to look the unit and we will feed the cables through and just hook it up there it goes oh nice [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I had to take down all my half inch conduit and upgrade to 3/4 conduit reason being is I upgraded the compressor wiring and I also am adding three more wires for the AC unit so the per NEC code the conduit fill reached the limits of the half inch conduit so it required me to go to 3/4 so I tore down all the half-inch stuff Here I am rebending 3/4 conduit and just re running what I had okay so bending conduits actually pretty simple and if you screw up a stick you know it's a couple bucks for a new ten-foot stick a conduit but basically if you google conduit bending theory there's a lot of good resources for on how to do it okay so here's the electrical service that's gonna poke through the cinderblock basically what I found is some half-inch nipples so I got a six inch here I got a two inch a two inch and I got a couple couplers and basically what I'm gonna do is join a bunch of these together to get the correct length that pokes through the block brick so it turns out that this stack here of parts works good now 1lb is going to point straight up and one is going to point down so what I'll probably do is put a paint line mark across here meaning it faces up and I'll assemble this and I will mix up a little mortar and pack the joint nice and tight and obviously paint it afterwards so here's a small amount of mortar you can buy a little 10 pound bag cost a couple bucks and I'll just slop it in around that hole okay so let's recap on the conduit run you can see it coming out of the box up there the three quarter runs along the top there there's the air handler let me jump up there and show you what's going on over there okay so once I get to this box the drop that goes down is still 3/4 that goes to my compressor there's the switch for that and then over here I transition to half-inch EMT and then you can see that's where pokes out the wall okay and goes to the condenser outside okay I want to talk about how I am going to connect the electrical service outside so this will be the elbe that's poked outside of the garage this is an Elbe and what I will have on here is one of these guys here which is a rain tight connector there's a seal here and a compression fitting here it'll be half-inch EMT that will lead to this box which is a disconnect it's a non usable non fused disconnect okay and how this works is right now it's in the on setting so there's kind of nudity in between the contacts here and if there's ever a service technician or someone that needs to work on the outside unit they they pull this guy out it kills the power to the unit and to hide these contacts or to make them dead per se you could flip this and it goes into like a dead spot and now you can see it's on off okay and here's a ground lug okay so we will have half-inch EMT going to these rain tight connectors and I will have a whip off of this a liquid tight whip from here to the outside unit okay here is the outside run I'm just using half-inch EMT from the elbow to the disconnect box using rate rain tight connectors and just anchoring the disconnect box which is right above the unit this will all be painted once I'm done all right so box is mounted here with two tapkins got my wet connector here little offset been nine got a clamp lb I just got to repack that joint with mortar and this is all plumbed and I'll just have my whip coming off of there and should be ready to pull wire now okay so this 18k unit is a 220 unit 220 volts so that means we got to run two hots and a ground I believe they're 12 K unit is a hundred twenty fold version but anything above that is a 220 volt version okay so here's the wire that I'm using it is 12 gauge thh n this is yellow solid black solid and here I have green stranded green is ground and then we need two colors for hot doesn't matter what colors you use just can't use green and white greens for ground whites for neutral so really you can use any other colors I just happen to have yellow hopefully that's enough and I have black so these will be my two hot conductors line one line two and my ground so we'll fish these three with fish tape through the run okay so I got a piece of half-inch conduit here set up between two chairs I got my three spools this is for the mr. cool unit this is for the compressor okay so I have six wires going into that 3/4 EMT and I got it all taped up and hooked up to my fish tape a little bit of wire pull Lube to make things go easier and we'll just yank it through alright so here I am fishing some wires this job would totally go much easier with two people one person here at the panel lubing up all the wires and making them straight as possible and then one person on the other end pullin on the fish tape I did this all by myself and I just had to go back and forth several times and you know do it by myself but hey it worked out okay we need to make a whip for the outdoor unit from the disconnect to the unit this is a six foot liquid tight whip that you can buy this is what it came with these connectors in this guy with no wires at the big-box store okay so right here with the tape is where I marked it where how long it should be so I got some cutters here and I will just cut that guy right here so we got two different ends here okay so these just get screwed in ok jam those ends on make sure they fully bottomed out okay so here's my run of wires that I pulled a little extra and just snipped it so what I'll do is I will run this through here okay we're gonna want like six inches of extra on each side and then we can go outside and hook this up okay guys anytime you're working on anything electrical you need to shut off the power okay I got this panel loose but anyway you're gonna want to shut the main breaker off okay and then when you remove this cover there's still some live wires in there so I'll show you a little tool to help you identify those and obviously you have to stay away from it now if you do not feel comfortable with any electrical work hire it out okay okay so only light I have on right now is the camera light okay what I have here is this tool here and it detects voltage just by touching this plastic tip to a wider so watch this so this is a subpanel these feeders are from the house and these are still alive so obviously those contacts right there on that main breaker are still alive okay so you want to make note of that however this panel is dead so these bus bars here are all dead and so with all the other all these breakers down here okay okay so what we have here is a brand new breaker it's a two pole for 220 and it's a 20 amp rating okay I just happen to have a Siemens box here and how this works is you just hook it in over here and you snap it in and that's it okay first let's take care of the green wire here my panel is a sub panel and the neutral and ground are not bonded okay so here is my ground bus bar okay you can see the whites go here the neutral so this is a neutral bar but anyway I'm gonna take this guy here trim it and attach it to that this guy over here okay please don't pay attention in these wires this is for my compressor I upgraded the wiring because I will upgrade to a larger compressor so I have extra lengths here so I can pull it in the box if I need to because that's all not 100% right now so please disregard these wires that are extra length here it's connected properly but again I'm gonna redo that later all right so my ground wire is in there and I'm just gonna cinch that down okay next up is our yellow and black which will go to the two breaker contacts these are hot wires here [Music] okay yellow wires hooked up let's do the black and I like 290 the wire like that to make it all clean looking okay all the three wires are hooked up to hots and a ground hey make sure to pop out your metal tabs okay the powers still off at this point [Music] okay this breaker is still off let's go ahead and restore power to the main alright let's hook up our three lines coming from the main panel the powers off so we got our ground and two hots and I removed this cover here from this disconnect let's go ahead and hook up the ground that is the easiest thing to do so right here is our ground lug so we'll just have to strip back a little bit of this wiring I'll actually probably trim it a little bit okay so that's nice and tight now notice that there is line and load on each side so we're gonna hook these up to line so we'll put the yellow here in the black here and it doesn't matter just go ahead in and then this black one will go to the line here okay so that's hooked up okay now it's time for our whip pull some of the wire on the other end okay we will strip this and then put it in the bottom lug here okay we'll take the black and put it to this load it looks good all right in the yellow to the load okay so we're all done there here's our disconnect this is in the off position right now let's go ahead and put this cover on since cover just hides everything we just worked on okay and when you're ready to power this thing up you just flip it to the odd position and shove this guy in and then obviously turn on the breaker but we got a little work to do by the unit here okay go ahead and remove the cover on the unit and that exposes all the terminals make sure to pop out the little plastic caps so we can run our whip in there and also the cord that's gonna run to the air handler I'm gonna be using a cord grip and it's basically a little compression fitting so you run your wires through there and install it in the knockout hole and then when you tighten the nut it compresses the rubber gasket and makes a nice tight seal against the cord so it helps they use a little bit of silicone spray and then you just work the wires through and install it in the knockout okay it's really hard to screw up this wiring because they have it all labeled for you the red wire goes to number one the white wire goes to number two and then the black wire goes to number three and it's all labeled for you and then of course the green goes to ground okay now it's time to hook up the whip there's three wires the black will go to l1 the yellow will go to l2 and then the green will go to the green ground screw okay once you're done just make sure to replace the cover with the screws provided so here I am painting the line set guards and what I'm laying down here is an adhesion primer so it'll stick to the plastic the color of this is white so you can't really see anything going on but basically if you go to the paint store and tell them what you're doing telling them you're painting plastic they will hook you up with some adhesion primer and then the correct paint to topcoat it all right after the adhesion primer is done here is the top coat which is the same color as my garage so I can blend this line set guard to the color of the garage so that way you can barely see see this once it's all done next up time to uncoil the refrigerant lines the easiest way to do this is to just keep it on the ground put your foot on one end and just unroll it nice and slow okay it's time to hook up the lines and this is really hard to screw up because there's a larger diameter line which is the suction and then you got your smaller diameter and all you need is two adjustable wrenches to tighten up both ends of the lines and you tighten it until it bottoms out until it's snug and you're done and here's a picture of what the finished product looks like okay here I am packing the collar with the neoprene putty that they provide and then of course I forgot to put the collar on so I have to slide it up the whole line set but in any case this piece goes on and it creates a seal here's the first piece of the line set that needs to get screwed to the garage working my way down with the line set guard make sure this guy is nice and vertical screw it in with some tap cons and then attach the condensate hose so gently pushing down on the line set to make the curve check-in fitment with the top cover and packing it with more neoprene packing to create a really good seal so no air bugs and stuff gets in the garage at this point we can attach the top cover screw it in and this area is done with the line set guard so now it's a matter of making a 90 degree turn and doing the horizontal run for the line set Here I am just slowly tweaking the line to make the horizontal transition well I ran out of line set guard I need to order another kit but a meantime I am unrolling the refrigerant lines and there'll be some extra that will be tucked behind the unit but I'm just getting a rough run right now okay next up we can hook up the lines to the unit you want to orient the lines such that there's no stress on all the fittings so here I am just tweaking it a little bit just to make a nice generous Bend and allow the threads to easily come together and Here I am just attaching the line finger tight on my model the suction line or the big line goes on top and the smaller diameter on the bottom so once you have the threads started just go ahead and finish it off with two adjustable wrenches and these fittings are made to completely bottom out and just snug them up they do have torque values in the instructions provided so same procedure for the smaller bottom line go ahead and get the threads started and just tighten it up with an adjustable wrench at this point we can remove the caps and open up the valves to allow refrigerant to enter the lines go ahead and spray soapy water on the fittings and check for leaks don't forget to check for leaks at the other end of the connection which is where the unit or where the line set pokes out the wall we're ready to power up our unit so just flip this guy to on push it in there good to go okay all our electrical is hooked up we got the disconnect on the on position outside so now we can flip this breaker on and see if our unit will work okay so we're ready to power this thing up for the first time got our breaker on electrical is all good we open the valve let the refrigerant in so far soapy water check no leaks we'll run it check it for soapy are for leaks again and we should be done so let's go ahead and hit done buddy there we go it's working so probably just wait a second or here or two here to make sure it cools everything the louver is swinging right now the fans on auto let me adjust the fan speed here so that is low this thing is insanely quiet so far that's medium so it's a little faster and that's high so I I mean obviously I can hear it but man this fan probably won't even come up in the video which is awesome so this thing is really quiet they also have a turbo mode let's see how loud that is so that's turbo let's turn the turtle off yeah it's nice and cold man that's awesome oh man and it feels good alright so let's go ahead and hook up the little dongle we'll get the app going so I can control it from my phone I mean that's really important to me but overall it's working awesome okay we're gonna be installing this controller so I can control this guy through my phone and anywhere in the world some instructions and then you get a little dongle alright so to install this guy you just flip this up all you do is plug it in right here that's it done okay downloaded the mr. cool app I registered it you can see I labeled it as garage it's green it's talking to the unit so I can just click on that power it up oh yeah let's make a cold man hmm there it goes I just heard a kick on can change the position of the diverter or the speed awesome so what's cool is I can do schedules so I can you know turn this thing on before I get out here and that's the whole point right cool it down drop the humidity so yeah this is very cool okay let's open this guy up okay so we got to power this thing up through a wall adapter or through thermostat wiring I'm just gonna power it up through the wall adapter since I don't have 24 volts available at the moment maybe I can hook it up to my garage heater thermostat wiring because that supplies 24 volts but that's for another time you can mount it on the wall or it comes with this little little kickstand here okay just power this guy up alright so this guy is all set up okay so my other line set guard kit came in to finish off the run here so I'm just attaching more horizontal pieces so I can make my way to the unit all right after triple checking for no leaks it comes with these damping pads that you wrap around the lines here the kick comes with some three or four rolls of vinyl tape and what you do is you start at the unit and work your way towards the indoor unit in this way if any water gets on the line set it'll shut it off so now it's time to put some of the covers on and also comes with clips and zip ties so you can attach the line set inside the guard set and once you got that all attached put the covers on and should be good to go all right let's take a look at the install here it's all done and they close this door really quick all right so we come out of the wall here's all the line set guards and it runs over that way okay and down here what I did is I whittled away what I did here is made a little opening and there is the two for the condensation drain alright so I turn the unit on let's go take a look at that you can hear how quiet it is so it's running right now and I'm just talking normally and it's really quiet and then over here I spray-paint at the electrical so it cleans that up over here you can see I use the one transition that is meant for poking out the wall but this one works best for my situation which does a ninety on the outside corner and then have just enough line set tucked back there and what I need to do is get some foam foam tape and clean this up a little bit better get some white foam tape and finish that off but yeah it's all done man okay well that's it for this video I'll wait for a nice hot day and we'll do a little performance update on the unit so stay tuned for that [Music] [Music]

Channel: MatthewMCRepair

Views: 277,151

Rating: 4.8065114 out of 5

Keywords: MatthewMCRepair, motorcycle repair, Matthew Bochnak, mini split, mrcool, diy, garage a/c

Id: 7BNITpRocz0

Length: 55min 36sec (3336 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020