Installing My Own Mini-Split Heat Pump, DIY

it's springtime right now but the heat of summer is right around the corner so it's time to upgrade from my broken mini split heat pump to a brand new mr cool heat pump but the best part this is diy or do-it-yourself which is perfect for me so let's get going [Music] this is the electrical disconnect for the mini split now i've already turned off the circuit breaker inside the house but inside here is another disconnect so what you do is you pull this and you can flip it over and if you flip it over then these copper tabs they go just into a plastic slot and they don't actually make connection with anything so that's a way to store it and there's now no electrical connection there shouldn't be any refrigerant still inside the lines because this has a leak about seven years ago i hired a local hvac company to come out and install this fujitsu heat pump it worked well for about two years before its first failure since then i've had three separate occasions where i've hired different hvac companies to attempt to fix this in total i've spent over five thousand dollars trying to keep this heat pump working uh once that still didn't work that's when i tried to make some videos and do the repair myself still couldn't find the leak there's a leak somewhere in the system that's why i decided to go with a diy route so mr cool makes this diy uh heat pump where you can put it together without needing specialized hvac tools so i reached out to mr cool and asked them to help with this video and they agreed so thank you mr cool for that i built this concrete pad with these concrete risers in four inch pvc pipe to keep this up off the snow all right here's a nice cardboard template that came with the indoor unit so there's going to be a metal bracket that goes on the wall and here's where they want me to cut out for the refrigerant lines and condensate to go through the wall so i'm just going to use this and go around here and a few seconds later i think i'm done cutting that out here we go so now i can go put this up on the wall and line up this hole with the existing hole through the wall here's my existing hole through the wall from the old unit so i'm just going to take the template now with the hole cut out i'm going to line this up the new unit wants a larger hole than the old unit was so i'm going to line up the bottom and cut it out and i'm going to drill a little hole right here in the center where the mounting plate is going to attach there we go so i'm going to use my drill bit and just put the drill bit in now there's no stud here so i'm just on the drywall but i'm going to use this as my pivot point now i can level this out back and forth and then i can mark for the other holes that need to be drilled there's some little arrows stamped on the template to the corners go so now we've got our four holes now i'll put in these little drywall anchors right here is the stud i'm going to throw in one more structural screw at the stud with the mounting plate on the wall and the hole drilled you can actually see inside all the cellulose now this is a dense pack cellulose house and here the studs and cellulose this is what should occur if you have a properly dense pack wall this doesn't collapse it doesn't fall in on you if it's properly dense packed this is the indoor head unit so this is going to go inside the house and i have to bend these copper tubes out of the way so they can go through the wall along with the electrical line and the condensate so i'm going to go ahead and do that now and i was pleasantly surprised when i pulled this back it looks like the copper refrigerant lines are wrapped in a steel spring to keep me from kinking them so they really did think this through as far as a diy um a daddy not done here's where the refrigerant lines came out the back side of the house the condensate is on the bottom that was an important part in the instructions and i spray foamed all up in there as far as i could reach inside the wall cavity using a low density window and door foam i just screwed on this backer plate which is the first part of putting the cover over the lines oh uh i have some nylog all right so as you can see these are custom fittings the line set connections are complete so at this point we need to actually release the refrigerant and check for leaks so to do that we'll take these two dust caps off now inside is a little valve and it has an allen key on it and they sent the allen key with it which is awesome so it says to slowly open this and you might hear a hissing sound yeah very very slight little hissing sound there it says open it all the way now we'll open up the bottom one and open its valve to check for leaks with soapy water or what i'm going to use i have some leak detection fluid we're watching for any bubbles okay up top we're spraying these ones down and we're looking for any leaks and i don't see any now something that really impressed me about these refrigerant lines is they're wrapped in this metal spiral spring and that is an anti-kink it keeps you from bending it too tight and that's really awesome that they added that in the package they included some sound dampening material to go around these valves this it reminds me of what you might use like a car audio to dampen the panels of a car they included a little extra insulation inside the package for the vinyl cover came these little black plastic clips and i wasn't sure what they are for at first but it looks like they snap in here that me so i'm using this tape that they provided it's not really a tape so much as a vinyl wrap so i'm wrapping it around everything right before i exit this vinyl channel all right so i zip tied it with a little clip that they provide and i have to finish putting this cover on but right now this drip tube i don't actually want it to go all the way down to the ground so i'm just going to cut it off and now that will drip out i don't want to put stress on these brass fittings uh this whip has an extra red wire for 240 volt we don't need that okay red white black it all looks good so just like the color photo shows us so this is called a smart hvac controller and it looks like a usb flash drive and this should allow for hooking up to your smartphone so that goes right up in here now that everything's done we'll just flip this over i'm going to go to the google play store because there's an app for the phone mr cool smart hvac we'll install that so let's see if we can turn it on with this remote hey it has a display under there i didn't know it did that so here's the app on the phone all right it just uh beeped and connected up i think i told it 68 degrees fahrenheit in dry mode it's been running for a few minutes now let's see what the temperature says 42 40 38 this is in fahrenheit four celsius zero i think that's it as you can tell it's very quiet i'm thrilled it's working i don't see anything leaking i don't hear any hissing this is awesome so thank you very much mr cool for making a diy system if you enjoy the videos please like subscribe comment and share you

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 1,177,946

Rating: 4.7788944 out of 5

Keywords: DIY, Mr. Cool, mr cool, hvac, minisplit, mini-split, heat pump, air conditioner, dehumidifier, AC, do it yourself, build, pros, save, money

Id: WWBWdQy9qgw

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020