Winter Performance Review after Mr Cool Universal Heat Pump install: heating cost & tips

hey this is dave from houseparents.com so who would ever install a heat pump in the midwest well we've done that my brother rich and i show you how to do a job yourself so you can save a lot of money in the process and we did just that by installing this mr cool universal heat pump last summer and uh it was a bit of an experiment to see how well this would perform during a midwest winter and so today we're going to go through our winter review so we're going to run through what we did uh why we did it how we did it and the results and we'll break that all down for you so you can see how the mr cool universal heat pump worked throughout an entire winter we've always had gas heat during the winter for the past 20 years but had the opportunity to put this mr cool universal in the whole goal was to see if it would replace our gas furnace and not cost us an arm and a leg to use and so we're going to lay all the performance aspects out for you so you can get a good idea yourself of what you might be looking at if you tried to go down this very same road we had already received a quote for our existing system our air conditioner condenser died and so they're going to just replace the condenser and so i started looking for better solutions and ran across the mr cool heat pump and decided that i could get this condenser and the interior air handler for a little over half of what they wanted to charge me uh for just the condenser and so i was i thought this would be a good idea to give this a try because i had lots to gain very little to lose if you saw our previous video you saw us install this and it's really diy friendly so our plan was to replace the condenser which we did with this mr cool condenser and then inside the house we decided that we would basically do a parallel setup where we left the old gas furnace in its place and put the new mr cool air handler next to it and then we ran the ducting in such a ways it would go from the new air handler into the old air plenum of the old furnace and then distribute the air through the house i had to do a couple modifications but the whole goal was so that we could go ahead and try this as an experiment and basically put it in place just for this year to see food actually do the job the bigger question for us was how's it going to perform in the winter time we did have a couple issues having never owned a heat pump before i wasn't really that aware of but i learned pretty quickly yesterday we got a 11 inch snowfall one of the times i put my hand by the vents and it was it was a little on the cool side so i came out here and all this snow that you see over here is a drift and it had drifted over to this corner this corner of the the air conditioner and you can see right there this has a defrost mode and what happens is it'll any ice that accumulates on here it melts but this hole about this much right here was covered in snow and so that's one of the things i guess you have to watch out for is making sure that in in a high snow area that those fins don't get blocked or stay blocked but it's just something to be aware of with this kind of a setup one other time we had a smaller snowfall and there was a lot of snow in here and then the day after the snowfall it it got warm and the water started running down this way and then that night he got super cold again and water actually froze the blade uh solid so it wouldn't move so one evening i i noticed that the air out of the vents was continually cool and i came out here and basically had to take off this whole grill and put a hair dryer on the on the arms of the the blades of the fan to loosen them up so it would spin again uh just another precaution is not to let a lot of snow accumulate on here and then melt and refreeze it's something to be aware of our coldest temperature depending on how it was measured was somewhere between minus six and minus nine degrees fahrenheit and uh that's not an unusual temperature for where we are but it certainly is unusual to rely completely on a heat pump to bring you heat at those colder temperatures old heat pumps just plain and simple don't do it without a heat strip and yet this mr cool has a inverter the beauty of the inverter is that it allows it to run much more efficiently and be able to extract the heat from the environment even at those below zero temperatures the other thing we wanted to look at was performance in regards to cost and so here here's the results that we had from december through march here in the blue green you've got winter of 19 2019-2020 the four months december through march and in the gray we have december 20 through march of 2021 you can look at the average temperature if you add these four together versus the four of the year prior they're very close to the same as far as temperature goes uh this february which shows up in the month of march as far as the bill goes was really cold 23 was the stated average temperature from our bill and so that that means that was a pretty big expense 302 for the electric bill for that month we're taking the electric and the gas from last year versus the electric and the gas from this year so that all things are similar and what we ended up with was a total bill of 717 for 2020 and 988 for the bill for winter of 2021. and so the difference there is about 270 bucks and that's probably within what we expected it's more expensive to run electric than gas but not dramatically so and what's going to be interesting is when we look at the performance for the summer air conditioning to see how we do there and hopefully we make up some of that money because the new the condensers is much more efficient in summer cooling winter heat uh cost us more the price of mr cool and its installation was dramatically less than the quotes that we had so we're ahead there and so the last uh bit we'll have we'll have to wait till summer to see how how summer turns out all things considered without a heat strip the mr cool heated the house well uh without a huge amount in increasing cost and there's still summer to balance a lot of that out all in all we're happy with the mr cool performance but one thing we learned from this and that is the heat pump the mr cool heat pump with the inverter is more than capable of heating the house even at below zero temperatures without crazy utility bills compared to where we were a year ago but for the purposes of this video we we knew that heat costs were going to be more because we were relying only on electricity but we were hoping that our install setup was going to compensate for that and then additionally summer would would give us a greater advantage in our reducing our cooling costs hope this video helps be sure and subscribe we've got lots more videos coming thanks a lot for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: HouseBarons

Views: 184,683

Keywords: mrcool universal, mr cool installation, mrcool universal heat pump, mr cool, heat pump, mini split, mrcool diy, pre-charged line set, air conditioning, mr cool heat pump, heat pump not heating, heat pump defrost cycle, grand forks, north dakota, mr cool review, mr cool diy, mr cool diy mini split, mr cool universal review, mr coolheat pump winter review, mrcool cold weather review

Id: n_fVbtqav2o

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021