In this podcast, John Maher and Jesse Corso from N.E.T.R., Inc. discuss the steps and considerations involved in installing ductless heat pumps, including the compatibility with existing home structures, optimal placement of indoor and outdoor units, and ways to ensure efficiency. They cover details on how these systems can be integrated into older homes, potential challenges, and how customers can visualize their system setup before installation.
John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher and I’m here today with Jesse Corso, comfort consultant with N.E.T.R. Inc., a heating and cooling company in Massachusetts with a focus on ductless heating and cooling products. Today our topic is ductless heat pump installation and compatibility. Welcome, Jesse.
Jesse Corso: Hi John. How are you?
John: Thanks, how are you?
Jesse: Good.
What Steps Are Taken To Install A Ductless Heat Pump?
John: So, Jesse, what are some of the typical steps that are involved in installing a ductless heat pump?
Jesse: So, there’s a few basic steps. Step one would be mounting or installing the indoor units wherever they’re designed to go in the house. We like to give pretty much a drawn up report to the installation team on locations of indoor units and all that before they even get to the site. So got to go around the house, mount the indoor units.
John: What’s involved in that? Are you drilling a huge hole in the wall to mount those or what’s that like?
Jesse: The standard wall mount unit mounts right to the drywall surface of the wall using drywall anchors. Or if we hit a stud, we’ll just use basic screws. And then we are only drilling typically one three inch hole through that wall to the exterior of the house. So a lot of times we try to mount them on exterior walls on the surface of the wall. We use a three-inch hole saw, drill right to the outside, and then we can run our piping and everything on the exterior.
John: So, you’re not putting a big, big hole. It’s only a three-inch circle.
Jesse: Yep. Three inch diameter hole, not cutting out the whole wall. They mount right on the surface like a picture would.
Other Steps for Ductless Heat Pumps
John: Right. And then what are the other steps for installation?
Jesse: After that, we’re going to set the outdoor unit, at least determine its location, whether it’s one, two, three outdoor units, however many you have. We’re going to set those on. We’re going to put some crushed stone down, a plastic pad, a 12-inch stand typically, which gets us up off the ground a little bit for snow. And then the condenser, or the compressor outside is going to go right on that stand.
From there, we’re going to run our interconnecting piping. We’re going to run two interconnecting refrigerant lines, one power wire from the outdoor unit to the indoor unit, and then we’re going to run drain lines. And those typically go, we’ll go inside of, we call them fortress covers. Those will typically go inside of a cover to conceal it and make it look real clean on the exterior of the house. Most of the time that stuff’s on the exterior of the house.
Do The Covers Come in Different Colors?
John: Right. Do those covers come in different colors to kind of try to blend in or match the outside of my house?
Jesse: So, they have most common, we’re using white. They also have a dark brown, kind of looks like a dark chocolate type of color. And I believe, I have never personally used them, they have a tan and a gray, I think. So four colors that I can think of off the top of my head that those fortress covers come in.
What Compatibility Requirements Are There for Ductless Heat Pumps?
John: And are there any specific compatibility requirements for installing a ductless heat pump in an existing home?
Jesse: Yeah, so a lot of times if you have… Say you have no existing duct work in the house, the house has a boiler with baseboard heat, really no location to maybe run duct work. Say you don’t have an unfinished attic or an unfinished basement. That house would probably be a good candidate for an all ductless solution, no duct work at all.
If you have existing central AC or an existing hot air furnace with sheet metal ducts maybe in the basement or in the attic, sometimes what we can do is install an actual air handler connected to that duct work instead of a ductless unit on the wall of the space. And we can also connect that air handler to the same type of outside condenser that performs just as well in those cold climate situations. So you get the same performance out of it because you’re connecting it to the same compressor outside as you would for a ductless unit, but you’re utilizing your existing ducts in the home.
Typically, for that you’re covering a larger area with one single unit instead of putting multiple indoor heads around the house. You end up with less zones that way, but sometimes it works out a lot better.
How Do Heat Pumps Compare to Traditional Air Handlers?
John: Right. It would probably maybe be a little less expensive because you’re not getting all of those indoor units or is it kind of comparable with the air handler?
Jesse: Yeah. No, I would say in some situations it’s less expensive. Say you have a first floor where you would go, maybe you’d put four ductless units on that first floor, but if you have duct work, now you’re just doing one single air handler. That one-to-one, one compressor to one air handler might come in a little less expensive than say the four-port compressor outside and four indoor units all around the house. Might come in a little cheaper and it might also look a little cleaner. You won’t have as much piping running around as well.
How to Choose the Location for a Heat Pump System
John: Talk a little bit about how you choose the location on the outside of the home for the outdoor unit, that compressor. And where is it that you’re locating it and are there any disadvantages or advantages of putting it in one place versus another?
Jesse: Yes. So, a lot of considerations for placement of an outside unit. One would be snowfall. We don’t want it to place it outside, if it’s going to be used in the winter, we don’t want to place that unit in a high snowfall area, say right underneath a pitched roof where snow is going to fall right off and just cover that unit. So we want to consider that, maybe try to keep it to a gable end.
Another consideration is noise. If you have a first floor bedroom, we probably don’t want to put that compressor right next to the bedroom window or something like that. So you don’t want to hear that when you’re trying to sleep. They are quiet but they’re not silent. So noise is a consideration.
And then a huge factor is where’s that electric panel located in the house? We have to run a wire from the electric panel to the outside unit every day, always, all the time. So if you have a finished basement, you probably don’t want to put the outside compressor on the opposite side of the electric panel, because if you have a finished basement, how are we going to run a wire there? So considerations like that. If you have an all unfinished basement, no problem running the wire to wherever we got to go. So stuff to think about.
Can Ductless Units Be Installed in Older Homes?
John: And then can ductless units be installed in older homes and buildings? Are there any factors that you need to consider there if you’ve got a much older home?
Jesse: Yeah, I would say older homes are great candidates because they don’t have existing ducts. They might have steam radiators or a baseboard heat or something like that. Ductless units come in handy for older homes, more so than trying to run a central AC system.
Considerations for that is if you’re mounting the indoor unit, what kind of wall are we working with? Is it lath and plaster or is it dry wall? Older homes might not have a dry walled surface, so we’ll have to bring the correct anchors to do that. Considerations other than that may be asbestos siding. We’ll take safety precautions. If a house has asbestos siding, we’re drilling holes through it, we just have to make sure we’re dealing with that properly.
Other considerations for older homes are electrical panels, old electrical, small services. Older homes tend to have a 100 amp service. Might not see many older homes unless they’ve been upgraded, might not see many with a 200 amp service. So electrical capacity is important to think about too.
What Potential Challenges Are There for Ductless Heat Pumps?
John: Are there any other types of potential challenges or limitations when it comes to the installation process for a ductless system in any type of home?
Jesse: What we’re running into a lot with this whole electrification thing is electrical capacity. Really 100 amps is kind of not cutting it anymore. So we’re doing a lot of… N.E.T.R. is doing a lot of service upgrades to go along with our heat pump installs. 200 amp service on a single family house is preferable. So we are seeing simply not enough electrical capacity a lot of times.
Other limitations would be can we physically run the interconnecting piping from where we put the unit inside the house to where the unit is on the outside? That all stems from our site visit where we drop our design. Before we even give a proposal, we have to make sure that it can actually physically be done, the interconnecting piping can actually be run from point A to point B. That’s a huge consideration.
Do Customers Know What to Expect Before Installation?
John: Do you show that plan to your customers so that they know what to expect when it comes to looking at the outside of their house and where all the pipes are going to be running and things like that? So that people might have a concern about, oh, I don’t want to have all these pipes running all over the back of my house or something like that. Do you show them what that’s going to look like?
Jesse: Absolutely, yeah. Any given appointment, I’ll take 50 plus photos, draw around them all, work with the customer on layout and design, draw where the lines will travel on the exterior, where the units will go inside, where the unit will go outside. So they’ll have a whole picture of what the system is going to look like, a design, if you will, before we even start any work. And if changes want to be made or need to be made, then we’ll make that ahead of time.
John: All right. Well that’s really great information, Jesse. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Jesse: Yeah, thank you John.
Information About N.E.T.R
John: And for more information, you can visit the N.E.T.R website at NETRinc.com or call 781-933-NETR. That’s 781-933-6387.
