I didn’t want a mini-split heat pump. Even the largest of them wouldn’t have much luck heating our barn of a house. They make some pretty big ones, BTU-wise, but you have to run multiple interior cassette radiators from a single big compressor. That means running refrigerant lines all over the side of your house. I’ve seen some comical Cthulu versions of that setup lately. If you don’t want to tear the interior of your house all to pieces to put in ducts, I guess min-splits make sense. Of course tearing my house to bits is a hobby with me, so it held no terrors. But unless you bought a mini-split of some sort, and paid an installer, you couldn’t get the phony coupon from the state of Maine, so that’s what everyone did.
If you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly “everyone.” For the most part, everyone is smarter than us, or at least attuned to the zeitgeist more congruently. They may do dumb things, but they do them the smart way. They swim with the current. It’s hard to fault them on this. It’s actually pretty hard to turn down free money. The free money sign is blinking, and some of the letters are burned out, but it still says FR E M NEY at noon on a sunny day, and they jump at it.
I wanted to run a single pair of refrigerant lines to a single air handler cabinet which would distribute the air to every room in the house. I’d be willing to put in ducts to make that happen. Tin knocking isn’t that complicated. That arrangement made perfect sense, so the fact that the state of Maine wouldn’t subsidize it was a Ho Hum moment for me.
Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m often prone to “and then a miracle occurs” stages in our construction projects. It’s not that I’m helpless or completely ill informed, exactly. It’s just that I’m overly optimistic about things. You know, like George Armstrong Custer and the Light Brigade were. We sometimes yell charge a little early, and then have to try to remember where we put the ammo box.
This HVAC system had a step that gave me pause. I knew I could install the whole thing. I’ve seen countless refrigeration and heating systems installed. However, that experience let me know that the “miracle occurs” stage shows up when the thing is in place and it needs to be charged with refrigerant. The lines have to be evacuated, and some very expensive coolant has to be loaded into all the piping. HVAC guys have specialty equipment and ready access to the super-freon gas they use now. I don’t have those things, and I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do the work for me. Then this hove into view:
About two years ago, this ensemble was available at the Orange Place, and the Blue Orange Place, and a few other online plumbing supply warehouses. Of course, because we’re talking about two years ago, the price was more than $1,000 lower. I had no idea at the time that Jerome Powell was going to sign up for the United States affiliate account to collect commissions on everything, but that appears to be the case.
But the price wasn’t what grabbed me. Oh no. The 25′ NoVac Install Kit you see mentioned in the description was the anaconda that Laocoöned my leg and started tugging. The compressor, the air handler coils, and the refrigerant lines come with the refrigerant already in them. You hook them together and turn a big hex wrench on the fittings and the thing is ready to rock and roll. All of a sudden, that bridge too far, the problem with charging the system, was in the rear view mirror. Like I said, this thing is truly a magic show.
Anyway, for $2,500 and a lot of elbow grease, we could finally have something resembling central heating in our house, and we wouldn’t have to hire a plumbing and heating guy to come in at the end and Custer the budget. And we’d get cooling, too, of course, because a heat pump is really just an air conditioner with the plug inserted backwards.
[To be continued]
