Anyone got air conditioning at home?

andrew-the-cat

I don't mean portable units, I mean proper fixed, ductless split units. Did you do it yourself or have a professional install it? How much did you pay? Did you need to get planning permission?

Looking at doing it myself...£400 for the equipment and a relatively straightforward install (F-Gas certified engineer to connect the pipework up). Will be used mainly during the day to help sleep (working night shifts in the summer and living on a building site is a pain), so solar panels will cover the majority of the power demand.

Andy_WSM

I have a fully ducted Fujitsu system in the main house (Bungalow) and keep it set to 22C in the living room and 20C in the bedrooms.

Very quiet in operation and inexpensive to run as I have 4kW of Solar on the roof. When it's warm in the UK it's generally Sunny, so when the A/C switches itself on most of the power used is generated locally.

I have a ductless split system (Mitsibushi) in the garden room, which is a log cabin. It's a bit noisier and obviosuly takes up wall space, but it works just as well.
I installed most of this and had my AC engineer vacuum the pipes and gas it up.

I didn't need planning as neither of the Outdoor units can be seen outside of my property, out of sight, out of mind.

andrew-the-cat

How much did a full ducted system cost you, and what is the input and output (cooling) power? I've never seen domestic ducted A/C in the UK.

Andy_WSM

andrew-the-cat wrote: »

How much did a full ducted system cost you, and what is the input and output (cooling) power? I've never seen domestic ducted A/C in the UK.

I am very fortunate to be friends with a commercial A/C engineer, so he was able to supply the A/C indoor & outdoor units, deliver them to my house and leave me to fit the flexible ductwork and outlet / return grilles in each room.

The supply of the unit was under £3k and I probably spent another £500 on ductwork & grilles.

Fitting & gassing the outdoor unit took a whole day as it is mounted on a bracket on the back of the house and pipes needed to be run into the loft and also to a drain, for condensate - same applies to the indoor unit, needed to be plumbed to a drain.

I paid well under £4k for the whole job, which made it worthwhile. Had it been much more I probably would have gone with split units in each room.

Very happy with the system though. It's 7 years old now and hasn't missed a beat. I use it mainly for cooling, but there was one Winter I was boilerless and used it for heating all Winter. Not so keen on the heat as I find it makes a draught, which is uncomfortable when you're trying to get warm.

Power wise, it's surprisingly economical! It runs on a 13A plug, but the typical draw when it is just maintaining the temperature is under 500W (It's an inverter unit) if you turn it on and expect it to shift a load of heat all at once, then it will draw about 2.5kW, I leave it on 24/7 though this time of year. It's got a cooling capacity of 7.1kW & a heating capacity of 8kW.

andrew-the-cat

That's pretty good, if the whole system runs on less than 13A. In the States I've seen crazy 20kW systems which need three phase power to run!

How many rooms are you cooling, what sort of solar gain etc, are you using blackout blinds in the bedrooms? How good is your insulation?

My house is a brand new build, and I'm not allowed to put anything substantial on the walls for the first 12 months, which is a pain because I also wanted to mount two of my TV's. At least it gives me time to think about it and research.

I'll definitely be using inverter driven kit, the system I was looking at has a 2.7kW cooling capacity. If it can maintain 20c when the outside temperature is 30c and use very little power to do so, then I'll be extremely happy as with the 1.5kW PV array it will cost me next to nothing to run during daylight (which is the majority of the time I am asleep).

Andy_WSM

I'm not in a very big place, 2 bed bungalow, but it is detached, which adds to the heat / cooling load. (edit - 5 rooms are heated / cooled + the hall) Insulation was topped up 8 years ago, so not up to current regs, but cavities have been filled. I have uninsulated solid floors here, so again, not good from an efficiency point of view! It's an early 70s build, so insulating more starts becoming costly and big work that I don't feel like entering in to.

Both bedrooms are South facing, which is why I had A/C installed - they were unbearably hot and being a bunglaow it was hard to get any sort of cooling breeze in the place.

1 bedroom is unused, but still heated & cooled and the blinds remain open in there, the other bedroom has wooden shutters which I tend to leave shut all the time anyway - If I was allowed to design a house where the bedrooms had no windows I would! But then I wouldn't have put the bedrooms on the South face either...

I'd say about 75% of my A/C requirements come from the Solar. This morning for example it's only 16C out, 22C in and the A/C hasn't switched on the compressor yet, it's only moving air around with the fan. Give it an hour it will start the compressor, by which time the solar is sending excess to the grid. Last night the A/C compressor switched off about 9pm, a couple of hours after the solar had stopped providing excess.

I leave the fan on low 24/7 this time of year. It cleans the air also and keeps the air comfortable.

sk240

Make sure you get an inverter driven unit.
I think they are great, you also get the additional advantage of the heating in the winter too.

rooflover

I've got a single wall mounted unit ducted to an outside wall. It was fitted by a local company and it's superb. The room is 7m x 5m and it heats and cools perfectly. Highly recommend it.

vienly

Sorry to bump such an old thread but was wondering what you guy's outdoor condenser noise level was like, is it noisy and would your neighbor complain about it? I'm thinking of getting the professionals in to install a multi split unit with 5 indoor units and 1 external condenser but can't find any information on how loud it is on Google or youtube.

Andy_WSM

The outdoor unit on mine is inverter driven, so the noise varies. It's noisiest at it's highest demand either heating or cooling. At no point can I hear it in the house and it's mounted on a bracket on the rear wall with rubber mounts to stop vibration. My house is detached and offset from the neighbours and they have no windows on the side of their house nearest mine so it hasn't even been a cause for concern. Yes, it's audible, but the fan is the noisy part and it's not the sort of noise that travels well and disturbs from a distance. Passing cars make more noise.