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Last time I was here at the tech house, I was crawling around like a monkey in the rafters installing Ethernet cable, and we found a big problem. It gets flipping hot in here. Now, obviously, part of the issue is the complete lack of insulation. But summers are getting hotter both here and around the world. I mean, what was it yesterday? 32, 33°, something like that. Ridiculous. No amount of insulation is going to keep especially that upstairs space comfortable during the summer. Now, with that in mind, there's a couple different ways that we can tackle heating and cooling for the tech house. With the bottom of the house already ducted for a forair gas fired furnace, we could have
simply replaced that with a heat pump that could do both heating and cooling. But that would have required us to expand our ducting to the upstairs. And also, based on the condition of everything under the house, we'd probably have to go through and painstakingly insulate all of those air ducts. Not an enviable task. Or we could just heat and cool the crawl space, which I'm sure the mice would appreciate, but my power bill wouldn't. Another option is to do what the previous owner did and throw these window-mounted AC units anywhere they sort of fit. They're much more efficient than those floor standing ones. Shout out technology connections. But they
don't exactly have an OEM look to them. And since we've got all the studs off, I felt like we could do a little cleaner. So I settled on door number three, a mini split heat pump system. This is going to do heating for us. It's going to do cooling for us. It offers per zone control in a way that is pretty tough to achieve with a ducted setup. And the best part is depending on your house, they can actually save you a bunch of money as well. You know what else saves you a bunch of money? If you skip this segue to our sponsor. My name's Custer Brinkle and I've been known to be a bit of an office jokester. That's why I've been planning this little prank for a while now. Okay, he's
never going to see this coming, but we are adding ODO to everyone's workflow and we're going to see how they react. You and I could make our dreams come true. One of the biggest challenges for any heating and cooling system is managing your capacity because you're going to have varying loads throughout the day depending on what devices or people are occupying the space as well as varying conditions. The day gets colder and hotter, the sun's shining or it's not shining. And that's where units like these are absolutely fire. Each of our units is good for about 9,000 BTUs of cooling or 12,000 BTUs of heating, which
um looking at the size of this space would be kind of ridiculous. I mean, we could get away with like a third of that probably. But what's cool is these newer inverter style evaporators don't have to run at 100% speed. So, they're not going to be GOING AT LIKE 9,000 BTUS of cooling, THEN OFF, 9,000 BTUS OF COOLING, then off. Instead, they're going to run at a more limited output for longer periods of time, which is going to allow them to pull more of the humidity out of the air, which can actually contribute to how hot we feel more than the raw temperature itself. It's not so much the heat, it's the humidity that will kill you.
Another nice thing is this dynamic capacity allows us to take that same size unit and install it in a room like this with big skylights that are absolutely baking it in the summer. Oh, it's horrible. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Movie magic. Some of them are already installed. Uh let's go back to the main bedroom and put that one in. To get this one up and running, there's a few things we're going to have to hook up. This is where our refrigerant goes in when we're on our cooling cycle. The air comes in this fan here and then blows through the evaporators that are on all four sides, cooling the air, and then it blows it out in a diffused way.
Otherwise, sitting right under this unit would be pretty freaking uncomfortable. Then because this is a heat pump, when it's on its heating cycle, the refrigerant actually cycles the other way, going in this side, then heating up as it's blowing the fan before coming out to the outdoor unit that we'll take a look at later. The last thing that we're going to have to hook up aside from our two refrigerant lines is this guy right here. When they're cooling, these units create a ton of condensation. so much that um the unit that I installed at my house with Brian the electrician back in the day ended up exposing a leak in my plumbing that I didn't know was there. It turns out the drain for my onsuite shower actually had
a crack in it down at the L between my first and second floor. That was never a problem when I just had a quick 10, 15, 20 minute shower. But when all of a sudden in the summer I had this condensation water just pouring down it constantly. Yeah. had ended up just like completely disintegrating all of the drywall above my laundry room. It was a real mess. So, all the plumbing connected to these is going to be like, you know, sealed, right? Cool. Conveniently, these ceiling cassette units are approximately the same width as a standard ceiling joist here in North America, and your mileage may vary depending on where you are in the world.
Make sure that you get one that is going to fit between this spacing. We uh almost made that mistake last time around. Once you've got an appropriately sized unit, our framers put together a nice little holder box for us that's going to allow us to hang our units off of. So, all we got to That was bound to happen. No, no, I'll get it. That's my penance. Otherwise, how will I learn? I'm never going to learn that. Now, all we got to do is make sure that this ready rod is Okay, that's not tight. And we're going to go ahead and uh Can't be that heavy, right? Oh, dude. Dude, the these have gotten so convenient. It's
been like four or five years since I installed one of these. Wow. This is so easy. Now, what we want to do is hook this bad boy onto here. I got it. Just give it a little percussive persuasion. Come on. Oh, there it goes. Now, we just put our washer on there. Oh, she's such a snug fit. I bet I don't even have to hold this, but I will. All right. Now, we just got to persuade it a little bit higher. A lot higher. Little by little. This is the sort of thing that benefits immensely from having a professional oversee it. But if you're handy, you could pretty easily get yourself to the point where these units are installed, you insulate everything, and then just have somebody come check
it over and do the actual refrigerant charging. It's a surprisingly accessible DIY job, having done it once myself. That's one of the reasons it baffles me how long it took these things to take off in North America. Like even just 5 years ago, people looked at you like you were from the moon when you talked about mini splits over here. But in Asia, they've been using these things forever. Ducted is just so much more work than just running. There it is. That's all you got to run. There's your insulated refrigerant lines versus doing a bunch of duct work. You got to be kidding me.
Even though this is the right size, it's a little tight. It's a feature though, right? Press fit. We're actually going to leave this right about here. We're not going to bother to finetune it exactly flush to the studs because once the drywallers come in here, things might get thrown a little bit out of whack. So, it's better for us to come in afterward, fine-tune it, and then we can go ahead and put the top fascia piece on top of it. I mean, just to show you guys what that looks like, maybe we can throw it on. Now, this is probably the lowest wife approval factor of these insealing cassettes cuz once you get this on top of it, they are a little bit on the big side.
There are a couple of things that you need to plug in on these. There's a temperature sensor on the air intake. So, you'll need to plug that cable harness in. And then there's actually little controls. There you go. On these flaps here that tells them whether to open or close or open then close if you want to create a little bit more air circulation. And then the last major feature here is boom, washable filter. So, you don't have to go and replace your filter every year or two. You just pop this out, wash it in the sink, pop it back up there, and you're good to go. I'm not even gonna try to put this on right now. I don't think there's any point. It looks like that. Now that the
unit's in place, we're ready to connect our refrigerant lines. Usually, these mini split systems come with some prefabbed copper lines that are pretty much ready to screw on, plugandplay. But it assumes that the length of those lines is correct for your installation, which is not always the case. That's where a certified installer would be able to, you know, braze some extensions onto it and make sure that they adjust the amount of refrigerant they're putting into the system to account for any extra volume in those longer lines. One of the things we're going to need to do before we connect them, though, is I'm just going to go ahead and put this wrench on here. Okay. And I'm going to
loosen this. These units come pre-charged with an inert gas, nitrogen, to make sure that they don't have any moisture in them. Any moisture in a refrigeration system is bad. Water cannot be compressed and it is not kind to compressors. So, having an inert gas, that's, by the way, a very safe gas. It's 78% of what I'm breathing right now, is a great way to keep any moisture out of this bad boy. You notice I had my head clear of this when I was uh when I was cracking this nut. That's because the contents are under pressure and they can come flying off. You don't want to take one of those in the eye. Conveniently, unlike last time, the wonderful text at Luxair Services went ahead and they uh extended these lines
for us already. So, what I'm going to do is one by one, I'm just going to cut back the insulation on here. Then, I stash my Hacksmith blade, hacksmith.store, in my cargo pants, ltstore.com, and I'm going to go ahead and mark exactly the length that I want on this line. You'll note that I left a little bit of slack in it before. That's cuz even when I mark it, ah, mistakes happen. So, we want to make sure that we've got a little bit of breathing room and we're not going to have too tight of a bend radius at that 90° over there. We're going to go right there. And then we're going to, you know, we'll have a little bit of leeway one way or the other. One annoying thing is I'm going to need this nut. So, because of this
crimp termination that we got going on here, I'm going to need one of these. And now I play the turning game. There's obviously faster ways to cut a piece of copper, but this is clean. Now, we're just going to do the same thing up here. Now that we're working on a piece that we actually want to keep, there's one more step, and that's to get on the inside here and just give it a quick deburring. We're going to point the pipe down so that we don't accidentally get any of these scraps going up into the system here. Next, we're going to flare this end to made it to our ceiling cassette, but not before we put this fitting on. Classic water cooling heat shrink tubing mistake. Never forget to
put this on before you flare the end. Never used one of these, so this should be fun. This is a quarter inch line. So, we're going to go ahead and stick that through the That was bound to happen. So, we put it in the quarterin spot. Then, we've got a little clip right here that just helps us landmark how deep in it's supposed to go. And we just walk this little guy over here. Okay. We lock this in place. And theoretically, this is all on here. And we get Remember how I, you know, left a little bit of extra just in case I screw up the end? This is why you can't overdo it. It's got built-in torque verification. So, we're just going to go ahead and back this off and hope that it's flared. Just because your method is
awkward doesn't mean you won't get the right result. Let's have a look. Not the cleanest looking thing I've ever seen. Actually, never mind. It's fine. I mangled the outside. So, you can see I got it all scuffed from sliding in and out of there, but the inside's fine. And that's the mating surface. So, yay. All right. Up we go. And there we go. She goes right there. Now, manufacturers say not to use Nylog to help with the seal, but according to the boys, like everybody uses it. So, we're going to show installing according to manufacturer specifications, but if I'm being real, they're probably going to go around after this and they're going to put a little bit on there. So, now it's
time to torque it down. Anywhere from 10 to 13 is good for the size of tubing that we've got here. So, we're just going to back wrench it. Use our digital torque wrench and nope. One moment, please. Oh, yeah. There it goes. Okay. Nailed it. Now we just got to do the other one. Movie magic. Couple things had to be done before I brought you guys out here. We, it turns out, did not do a concrete pad. I assume for cost reasons, we just threw a couple of these little footer units out here. Man, I would have done this at my place if I'd known I could save a dollar doing it this way. That's freaking awesome. Now, let's take a look at our outdoor unit.
The capacity of this unit is actually a hair less than the total of the five ceiling cassettes that we have indoors, but in practical terms, that's never going to matter because they're never going to be running at full tilt. Each of these electronic expansion valves controls one of our five cassettes inside, offering extremely granular control of over 200 steps. So, that larger open concept space where we've got the 12,000 BTU cooling unit, that one's going to have its valve open pretty much full bore. Whereas those little tiny bedrooms, well, the only reason that each of them got a dedicated 9,000 BTU cassette is because we don't know what temperature is going to be comfortable for the occupants while
they're sleeping. And I don't know about you guys, but for me, that's the time that I care about air conditioning the most. Looking at the layout of this thing, it's pretty standard for a refrigeration system, except that because it's a heat pump, it's got this reverse valve over here. So, this is what allows it to kick off of refrigeration mode, cooling the inside, and kick back into heating mode. So, whenever it's cooling on the inside, we're going to have waste heat being kicked out here. And whenever we're heating on the inside, it's going to be cold here, which is one of the Achilles heels of heat pumps. You see, when we want to heat the inside, it's because it's cold outside. And if we're
throwing more cold at the cold, you can end up icing the back of these things. The operating temperature for this unit goes down to -15° C, though. So, you might think, well, that's pretty cold. You'd think you'd get a big ice block back here, and you will, but it detects that, and it will temporarily switch into cooling mode inside, not for long enough that you'd notice, deic, and then flip back into heating mode. Also, a pretty typical install for these things, if you're not in a temperate climate, would have a supplementary heating system in the event that it gets too cold for your heat pump to operate. The last thing that needs to be wired up is
the interior thermostats. Otherwise, how would we know how much heating or how much cooling to provide? And these are using data from both the temperature inside the room as well as these thermal probes on both the hot side and cold side of the refrigerant here. Of course, that's a job for the pros. So, all that remains for us to do is a quick pressure test to see if my uh ceiling cassette install is leaking or not. So, we just got to open this valve from our nitrogen cylinder here. We're going to go to about 50 or 60 PSI. If we were actually pressure testing this thing to deploy it today, we'd want to do more like 600. But if we put 600 in it and we did have a little leak, when we went to put our
soapy bubble solution on all of these fittings, it would just blow the bubble solution away. It'd be hard to really see those bubbles. So, we want to give it a little bit less than that. Now, we're sitting tight at around 53 PSI. But, you can actually see right now, we're losing a little bit of pressure. So, why don't we see if we can find it? In this case, it wasn't that hard to find, but I'm still going to show you guys the bubble solution. Oh, I got a really nice bubble there. Okay, we're at about 11 now and it is not leaking. Let's go see if we're still losing air. Now, we're going to give her maybe more like 100 PSI. Nice round number. Oh, no. We're still dropping a little bit. Every one of those is a
dagger through the heart. I hope it's not mine. Yes. Ah, okay. Let's go upstairs. I hear it. It's up here. All right. That's okay. I have the tool. All right. 11.4. That's in between 10 and 13. Let's try again. Third time's a charm. Oh, buddy. She's locked. She's going nowhere. 104.7. Good boy. Up here. Hey, it's been a few weeks and I was hoping to show you guys the whole complicated calibration and commissioning process for this unit, but it was actually really simple. We just powered it on and it automatically
ensured that all the various units were able to talk to each other. And then regarding the refrigerant, it turns out that even though we extended our lines, they ended up being exactly the right length for the 6 1/2 lb of refrigerant that comes preloaded in it. So, we let the charge loose and it was good to go. So, we're ready to feel some frosty air. And we will as soon as we evacuate any air that's stuck in these lines. You might remember this from earlier, but air contains water. Water's bad. So, we're going to let them clear these lines before we start up this unit. All right, here we go. Big moment. Don't love touch interfaces for things like this. might prefer physical clicky buttons, but um anyway,
temperature setting is not possible. H well, there's your problem right there. That was so intuitive. It's not that cold yet, but we were actually expecting that. There's about a 5minute delay to protect the compressor from people who are like, I'm hot, now I'm cold, now I'm hot, now I'm cold. So, actually, that gives us a good opportunity while we wait to talk about cost. The total cost for our condenser outside plus the five indoor units is around $15,000 Canadian. So about $11,000, which is a lot of money obviously for a home upgrade, but when you compare to what it might cost you to retrofit a ducted system, I was quoted I think like 25 or 30 grand 10 years ago at my old place. This is a fraction of the price.
We actually ran into a similar situation in Creator Warehouse, too, where they wanted to duct in a bunch of AC, and I was like, "Hey, can you just do a mini split?" It cost us a fraction. So, mini splits are a great way to save some money. And on top of that, you get per zone control without some kind of complicated baffle system that's running in the HVAC ducting. that as it turns out can be really challenging to set up correctly because as soon as you put backflow pressure against them it can cause all kinds of problems. So I'm a huge fan of mini splits. Every one of our zones is going to have one of these thermostats and everyone can be independently turned on and off. And if
you want to check out the specific units we're using or anything else that we've bought for the tech house, head over to the tech.house and you can check out the interactive home model that we have over there. The only big limitation is that I can't be running heat in the bedroom while I'm cooling the entertainment room. It's got to be one or the other throughout the house. But that's going to be true of any heat pump system, whether it's using ducting or mini splits. On the subject of ducting, by the way, if your house already has the ducting, it could be more cost effective to go with a ducted solution. But otherwise, man, I can't believe it took North America so long to come around to these things. They've been popular in
Asia for like forever. And hey, now we're kicked in. effective and I cannot wait to be doing our shoots here now that we actually have air conditioning. Also, it kind of doesn't matter because by the time we got the AC installed, it's like midepptember. So, whatever. Just like this whatever segue to our sponsor. Okay, we're going to get them so good. Oh, this is nice. You got cruster prinkled. Classic prank. I installed ODO on all of your computers and Yeah, this is great. Why didn't we do this sooner?
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