Mini-Split Installation For Dummies - Complete Step By Step Guide!!!

[Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome back to trial and error in this video I'm gonna show you how to install a mini split air conditioner or heat pump a / air conditioner the particular unit I ended up going with is from mr. cool and that's because I'm mr. cheap they had the best pricing and as it turns out now that I have it installed I actually like it better than the Mitsubishi one that I have installed in the house and actually we have three different Mitsubishi units in in house but this one as you can see is gonna be going into the garage and will work for heating and cooling and I didn't know much about HVAC before I endeavored on this process so that's why I'm calling this video for dummies you don't take it personally I'm a dummy myself but as you will see this though it can be or feel intimidating it really shouldn't be this is actually a very straightforward process and I think anybody that can turn a screwdriver could absolutely install one of these systems themselves and save a small fortune so here we go okay so as far as the mounting location goes get a unique situation right now because I'm about partway through sheathing the inside of the shop so what I've done is I left one babe open with no insulation right now because this is the one we're gonna run our refrigerant lines and the electrical down through I have one piece of four by a cheating here which is actually where we're gonna mount the indoor unit so I wanted this piece up so that had something to mount it to but I wanted access above and below it just in case we've got to do something funky with the refrigeration lines I want to make it nice and easy to run through so I thought that was a good way of doing it staggering them like you normally would but I get access above and below and I have a solid place to mount it because this is being used for heat and air conditioning recommended height on this is about eight feet I'm gonna be mounting mine right at the very top of this top piece here which is about eight feet and six inches or so so you about perfect to where it is now I've got 12 12 and a half foot ceilings in here and there is no sense in mounting it all the way up there it's just gonna work twice as hard to cool that air in the summer and it'll help just make it tougher to force the heat down in the winter so that's where we're going to go for the mounting location and we're going to start by drilling a pilot hole through somewhere where's my finger here we go that's what she said that's why does that even make sense now so we're gonna drill a pilot hole down here somewhere and then I'll come through the hole saw on the outside to make our first hold [Music] [Applause] [Music] so because I didn't drill it straight through and actually drilled it a well at this sort of an angle so in the event that we do get some rainwater anything like that it's gonna have to travel uphill to go anywhere so but that also means my bits too shallow to to drill through in one shot so we're just gonna find it on this side which is right about here and drill back down at that angle and there we go alright so now I'm gonna take a measurement basically from this side of the hole to the first stud is proud five-and-a-half google on the other side now mark our studs 16 on center so that we can put our bracket three up on the outside [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so when connecting the indoor unit to the outdoor unit you will notice that they have conveniently color-coded the wires but numerically coded the terminals so it doesn't even make any sense but as long as you connect the number one to the number one the number two to the number two and the number three to the number three and the ground obviously to the ground it doesn't matter what color you choose to be one two three or even ground for that matter but the terminal does matter on the ground so that's an easy one but just make sure you're consistent and that those three numbers are connected to the same conductors [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay for this portion I'm gonna preface it by saying you don't have to do this part I'm choosing to do this because I happen to have the flaring toolkit to do it but I could very easily bury the excess amount of this tubing in the wall and the only cautionary tale I have for you there is do not coil it I see it done in videos all over the place where people are coiling the tubes up usually outside and there's two things wrong with that one you're coiling up your refrigerant lines in an air conditioned space or in the winter obviously you're putting them in the cold area when you're trying to keep these things warm and two when you coil it in they stack it vertically you create oil traps at the bottom which is not a good thing so if you do have excess pipe my recommendation is in a wall like this would be to come out of that unit run it up all the way and then come down rather than to leave a coil so that you don't end up with an oil trap the other option is to kind of zigzag it in the wall cavity to eat up that excess pipe but as I said in my case I have the flaring tool so I'm going to cut the lines to length and put my own ends on it when you're reusing the ends that come with the kit here we're just gonna slide those guys off and just reuse them here but they actually supply you with a couple of extra ends and I'm not sure why but it's a nice thing to have I guess in the package but we're just gonna cut this to the exact length we need and go from there and there is a slight benefit to doing this although it is extremely slight the shorter your line set the more efficient the system will run but it's really negligible we're going to be chopping off maybe seven or eight feet of pipe here it the difference you would never never even notice it but certainly doesn't hurt to have a shorter line set assuming you don't have more freon or for 10a in the system based on the length of pipe that it thought you were going to have but we have a gauge that we can measure that and adjust if needed but cutting off a few feet isn't going to hurt anything for sure okay we'll get to cutting all right so now back at the outdoor unit we're ready to make the connections here permanently so we're gonna need a couple of things one of which is the night log and what we're gonna do we're gonna put a little bit on the back side of the flare connection we're gonna put some on the face being careful not to get it actually in the pipe itself and you don't need much just a little bit and then we're also going to put it on the flared fitting just the very flared just the tip mind you just the tip of this and we're also gonna get it in the threads as well next thing we're gonna do a set of vise grips on the valve body itself is we want to take off any load as we're tightening the line up to it and I'm gonna come over on the other side of the camera here because I want to visually make sure that my line is coming in at the proper angle you need to go up a little bit and you should be able to thread this on by hand all the way if you can't that probably means that your pipes come in at the wrong angle and even if you did get it on there it's not gonna make for an ideal mating surface the manual specifies a specific torque for these I'm going to ignore that because I don't have an open-ended torque wrench and pulling from my wealth of experience with copper pipe we're going to Snug it up we're then going to back it off a little bit and then we're gonna Snug it again down here get a better feel for it yeah good I'll repeat the same process on the low pressure wine [Music] [Music] all right back at the indoor unit we're ready to make that connection and on the indoor unit don't be surprised when you remove those caps either remove them slowly or push the little button on the end of it that'll allow you to release the nitrogen which is loaded into that coil before it's shipped so not a dangerous amount of pressure but you do want to back them off slowly let that pressure come back down and then remove the the cap [Music] [Music] okay so we're ready to finish up the wiring at the outdoor compressor the whole switch here so I did run ten three which is not needed but it's nice to have I don't know what I'll be doing down the road so we'll have an extra conductor here with the neutral on it but we do not need to connect that to anything at the moment so all I'm gonna do strip a little bit off of it I'm gonna cap it off and we'll coil it up at the bottom of the box yeah okay so the grounds we're gonna pull together and they're going to tie into the ground block that's in the center take some loose measurements we're just going to install the trim plate here and we will install the pull switch now there's an on side and an off side put it into the on side nice and tight all done okay so now we're just left to tie this into the sub panel out here in the garage I call this the OCD sub panel you might be able to tell why so I put in a pair of breakers right up there okay separator we'll do the ground line first you'll try to make it match everything else going on in here looks nice next we're going to grab the neutral keep that out mover and there we go okay we'll start by removing the service caps you know these are these are technically these are the valve caps we'll pull those guys off and then this is the surface port okay for the service port you are going to need an adapter this is a service port adapter for a split and I believe this is a five five sixteenths connection with the Schrader valve purge piece in the center there to connect to your low pressure hose and I closed up the valves here I'm gonna fire up the pump so after letting the vacuum pump draw the system down for 15 minutes I closed the valve on the low side and shut off the pump and then we waited and we waited to see if it would hold that vacuum for another 15 minutes so I'm still getting the same reading on the gauge so the next step is to open up the high-pressure port and we're gonna open it up just about a quarter of a turn and only for about five seconds or so just enough so that I get enough refrigerant in the line to go from a negative and slightly pressurize the system I'm starting to move up enough [Music] past zero now and we'll put stop it at about two pounds at about sorry not two pounds that's it yeah we good yeah where am I so that's one two three four so let's go up to go up to one pound and we'll stop it there so here again we're gonna stop and I'm gonna let it sit for another five ten minutes or so and we'll come back and check and make sure that that one pound that is now in the system hasn't gone anywhere there's the second reason we want to do it this way one is to double check that obviously our system isn't leaking under small amount of pressure but the other reason is we're going to release our service port here before we completely release all of the refrigerant in the system because this Schrader valve does cause you to lose a little bit in the process of unscrewing this so if you do it when there's only one pound in the system you're losing a minuscule amount if you do it when the system is fully pressurized losing considerably more okay another five minutes later and we are holding strong so going to go ahead and disconnect our service port connection and you hear that air coming out you can imagine what that would have been like if we had fully release a system now we're going to find the right sized cap which I think I left in the other room once again I throw a little nylon on these and we are ready to fully open the valve so going back to the high pressure valve first here and we'll open this guy up and here the refrigerant rushing in and you're gonna spin it until it is open fully but don't push hard these are all brass connections so you do have to be kind of delicate with it and on the low-pressure side we will open this valve nice and clean Oh once again happier than a and a miniskirt convention thing is a rip fire he's blasting out some heat nice and quiet too and this is running full bore right now spitting pieces of pine needles at me oh yeah look at that go so with that I tightened up some of the wiring and bundled the refrigerant lines together and got everything ready to drop insulation into that final Bay but it's uh it's working it purrs like a walrus it kept my shop at 56 degrees on Saturday when I was doing some work in there and it was 80 plus outside so what a difference that can make just so you all know again not cool enough to have mr. cool buying you this product response to the video this this is not sponsored by anyone only thing I ask that if you're going down this road if you would please consider clicking on the links I put in the description that goes a long way to help support in the channel and if you're not subscribed what the hell are you waiting for this is the best YouTube channel I've ever made but those of you that are thank you again for watching and please consider subscribing if you're not as always any questions concerns comments or criticisms throw them down in the comment section below me and have a great day everybody [Music]

Channel: Trial N' ERROR

Views: 994,297

Keywords: diy, teach, instructional, review, build, building, mini-split, mini, split, A/C, ac, hvac, heat, pump, heatpump, air conditioning, instal, installation, howto, mrcool, mr cool, mitsubishi

Id: RAFWJvzrsys

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019