Mike Cappuccio talks about air conditioning installations in Boston, the differences in types of homes in each area, and the different types of air conditioning systems that are available.
Hi, my name is Mike Cappuccio. I’m here today to talk to you about air conditioning installations in Boston, particularly in the city. Well, when we get into the city in Boston we have a lot of different types of homes in the city. We have the brick brownstones in the Boston area, Comm. Ave., Newbury Street, things like that where you have your typical brick type homes. Then we’ve got the South End of Boston where we have the three-level, old apartment buildings that were now turned into condominiums at some point. Then we’ve got the areas on the outskirts of Boston, you’ve got Somerville, Medford, Jamaica Plain, areas like that, where you have the big old-style Victorian homes.
A lot of people ask me, what type of air conditioning system is good for my home? I have to kind of take a step back and look at the different types of systems that there are available and in reality, there are about three different types of systems, the first one being your traditional ducted system. That’s a typical central air conditioning system that’s been around forever. It has ductwork that runs through the ceiling or runs through the floor and there are holes in the floor with registers. There’s going to be a big return air grill somewhere at some point in time put into the house; that’s where the air’s going to come back to. And there’s going to be an air handler that’s going to need to go in a closet or in an attic where the air is going to come back to.
That takes up a lot of room. You get into a lot of these homes that don’t have a lot of square footage, in the Boston area, and it’s going to require somewhat of maybe a three foot by three foot closet or a four foot by four foot closet depending on how much space you have to put this air handler. A lot of people just don’t want to give up the closet space. I mean they don’t want to give up that square footage, so they turn to looking at different alternatives. As far as the square footage for the ductwork, the square footage for the air handler, etc.
The second system that we’re seeing a lot of now is the high-velocity system. Still requires the air handler but it doesn’t require all of the big pieces of ductwork that need to run through the ceiling, or big trunks, etc., where you would be losing space from the metal. These would be small hoses that would run off of the air handler.
They’re about six inches round and you’d see a bunch of small holes in the ceiling that probably is about as big as a coke can, and the air is going to blow out of those. They could come up through the floor, it could come out through the ceiling. One of the downfalls of it, if it isn’t installed properly you can get a lot of whistling noise. You can still get traditional hot and cold spots with both of those systems because they only have one zone. They’re one zone, one thermostat, and the thermostat is usually placed by the return air vent somewhere.
The third system is the system that we install a lot, which is the Mitsubishi Ductless Heating & Air Conditioning System. It gives you heat, it gives you cool, but from the cooling perspective, it doesn’t require the ductwork needed that we have with the traditional ducted system. One of the advantages of it, you don’t have to clean any ductwork. Second advantage of it, you don’t have an air handler in there; you can put these wall units in the home, we can zone out the home, put them where they need to go in the home, they have this separate remote control which is basically the thermostat for there.
We put those into each part of the home, two bedrooms, living room area, we’d probably put a three zone in your house, run the piping and drains to an outdoor unit that can be set on a roof, a courtyard, or wherever you would put it. That’s what we install a lot of now and it’s becoming a more and more popular system because it can heat as well as cool. So we can get 100% heating in the cold days out of that system too, and we can eliminate all the ductwork in your home as well.
