This Is How I Go When I Go Like This

OK, OK, enough with the heat pump envy. I can see you’re convinced. You want a heat pump. You need a heat pump. You require a heat pump the way Victoria’s Secret catalog (used to) require skinny models with big racks. Well, I’m here to help. And just like Victoria’s Secret, you’re going to need a big rack to get by. The compressor that goes on the outside of your house needs to get up out of the mud, and snow if you’ve got any, and it’s heavy. You need a big rack, like this one:

Oops. Sorry, wrong folder. But you’re welcome, anyway. Here’s the rack I mentioned:

This is located in a mostly sheltered area outside our basement door. You might recall we added a porch there not too long ago.  You know, this thing:

It’s a good spot for the compressor. That red blank infill piece is in the upper wall of the carhole, the basement below our basement. We’ll run the refrigerant lines directly into the house and across the carhole ceiling and then drill up under the spot in the basement where the air handler will be located. It will be easy-ish to run electricity to that spot, too. Everything’s below ground, more or less. It’s below anything I care about, anyway. It will be up out of the snowbanks, too.

If you inspect the photo of the wall bracket again, you’ll notice two things, maybe. There are three lag bolts holding the bracket to the wall, and the two arms of the bracket are held vertically by some zip ties. Those lag bolts might not be enough to do the trick in a newer house. You’re supposed to find some serious framing to lag into, and in a new house that might be a chore. But we live in an old Victorian that’s built like a barn. There’s a giant timber running horizontally behind that bevel siding. It’s something on the order of 6″ x  8″ in cross section. In a newer house, sinking the bolts into the 2″ x 4″ framing through OSB ply siding and maybe some vinyl would be a recipe for sagging, or at least a lot of vibration transferring itself to the outside wall, and adding noise to the interior. The big timber kills that problem D E D dead.

OK, go on, guess how many times the arms of the bracket fell down and cracked me on the top of the head before I wised up and zip-tied them vertically. More than I wanted, less than I deserved is the correct answer.

This thing is a about three feet square and eighteen inches deep, and it weighs 185 pounds. We cheaped out on the bracket a little, and bought one that was rated for the weight, but had slightly shorter arms than we’d like. I put some framing lumber on the arms to extend it a little and make it easier to level it and bolt it down.

My two sons and I picked the thing up, carried it down the driveway, and plopped it on top of the bracket. It took longer to free the unit from its packaging than it did to install it. If you’re one of the very many Americans who think they’d rather have dogs than children, I must caution you that your dog will never grow up and help you with any HVAC installations. A dog would probably shed less than a teenaged boy, but still, they’re never going to mow the lawn for you either, although they’ll do other stuff on it. Choose wisely.

As you can see, there’s a big fan in the beast. It’s quieter than you might anticipate, though; about 55 decibels. If you’re unfamiliar with the decibel scale… I SAID, IF YOU’RE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE DECIBEL SCALE, and go to Megadeth concerts to test your hearing, here’s a handy chart of how relatively loud that is, and the chances it could have a deleterious effect on your hearing, from NIOSH:

Hmm. It ain’t on the chart. As a veteran of OSHA inspections incorporating some NIOSH specifications, I can assure you if they don’t care about it, it really doesn’t matter, because they do care about lots of things that don’t matter, too. Their scale is truncated at the top, too, because they stop at 194 decibels, and don’t have a rating for my mother calling me home for supper from the back porch when I was a kid. I don’t have a number for that, but I assume whales heard that a bit.

We cleaned out five years of savings to buy this thing, so we’re anxious to protect it. It’s weird, but if you actually pay for things instead of borrowing money to pay for things, you tend to value them more highly and take better care of them. And by “weird,” I mean “normal,” which isn’t very normal anymore.

Getting it up off the ground was only half the battle. In the winter we have, you know, winter weather. There are ice dams and giant icy stalactites depending from the eaves pretty regularly. We look up when we exit that door from November to April. The case of the heat pump looks more or less indestructible, but there’s a junction box full of electricity, with a whip conduit feeding the beast, two insulated copper refrigerant lines, and a itsy bitsy wire for the thermostat signal, too. I don’t want icy daggers hitting any of that. So we built a little roof over the unit to keep the rain and snow and ice from caroming off it. Like this:

So, now I guess all we need is an air handler. And some ducts for handled air.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and recommending Sippican Cottage to your friends. You can support this website directly using our tip jar, too. Many thanks go out to Steve for his generous hit on the Donate button]