Split Air con

[fobose]

I remember looking at these when I thought I might have to have one: https://www.airconspares.com/aspen-...-air-conditioning-condensate-pump-only-fp3322

They look reasonable quiet (20db) and fit in the trunking.

 

[Firestar_3x]

Yep got the above, work well and never been woken up by one.

 

[uncle_rufus]

We have the bluediamond condensate pump mentioned above and it's absolutely silent but it wasn't at first...

The unit it's connected to is on our top floor landing but on the opposite wall to the external wall (end terrace) so the piping runs up into the loft and then along the loft and exits outside. The pump was originally mounted in the loft and screwed directly to one of the ceiling (loft floor) joists/batons. That was horrendously noisy, not quite the same sound as in the clip above but more just like a big loud vibration BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT every time it activate (which could be anything from every 5 minutes to every 20 minutes depending on humidity in the house)

I contacted the company who fitted it and they came back, agreed it was unacceptable and fitted this rubber mounting gasket type thing to it - also moved it so it was attached it to the wall rather than the joist and made it virtually silent when it runs. A week or two later I noticed it would sometimes make a knocking/tapping noise which was quite irritating, but popping into the loft to watch it I realised it was one of the water tubes hanging from the pump which would swing about a little during the vibration and tap the wall. A little bit of shifting things around where pipes where cable-tied etc. to remove some of the slack and it's now totally silent

 

[R4z0r]

Does anybody have a single inside unit in their house and is it capable of dropping the temperature of the whole house if left on long enough?

In my house it’s simple and relatively inexpensive to install a single unit in the top bedroom (new build, 3 floor town house) but other units get extremely expensive (over 10K to get to the other bedrooms and then decorators costs to fix up the mess).

I don’t really care about individual room control, just want to drop the temp on the really hot days from 28c to 22c ish.

The house is very well insulated and all windows covered with film to reduce solar gain.

Is this a ridiculous idea or could it work to cool the house a bit without ripping all my walls apart to install the other units!

 

[fobose]

I don't think it will work as well as you would hope @R4z0r. I have a 3 floor town house with window film on the rear windows. I also have 1 AC unit on the top floor master bedroom and 2 more units on the middle floor at the back of the house. Leaving all 3 on does help to keep on top of the heat but the downstairs still gets warm (24-25c) on the really hot days.

 

[uncle_rufus]

We have one big unit top floor landing (3 floors) and one medium unit in our biggest downstairs room (a large open plan kitchen/diner/family room)... it works pretty good and certainly takes the edge off temperatures through the whole house. With only the upstairs unit on the downstairs gets/stays quite hot though (which is okay for us, we tend to turn the downstairs unit off when we go up to bed and just leave the upstairs one on if it's really hot overnight)

 

[CaptainRAVE]

Does anybody have a single inside unit in their house and is it capable of dropping the temperature of the whole house if left on long enough?

In my house it’s simple and relatively inexpensive to install a single unit in the top bedroom (new build, 3 floor town house) but other units get extremely expensive (over 10K to get to the other bedrooms and then decorators costs to fix up the mess).

I don’t really care about individual room control, just want to drop the temp on the really hot days from 28c to 22c ish.

The house is very well insulated and all windows covered with film to reduce solar gain.

Is this a ridiculous idea or could it work to cool the house a bit without ripping all my walls apart to install the other units!

If it was that easy everyone would do it. With all curtains closed, on a hot day our single master bedroom unit would at best reduce one of the other bedrooms by 3-4C, assuming all other doors were closed - it would also mean having to over cool the room it’s in. Depends on the size of your rooms of course and layout of them. It would have zero impact on downstairs.

 

[R4z0r]

If it was that easy everyone would do it. With all curtains closed, on a hot day our single master bedroom unit would at best reduce one of the other bedrooms by 3-4C, assuming all other doors were closed - it would also mean having to over cool the room it’s in. Depends on the size of your rooms of course and layout of them. It would have zero impact on downstairs.

Heh, thanks. I think I might need to think about how much I actually want it done, as it’s sounding like it will be expensive to do properly!

 

[andy_mk3]

If it was that easy everyone would do it. With all curtains closed, on a hot day our single master bedroom unit would at best reduce one of the other bedrooms by 3-4C, assuming all other doors were closed - it would also mean having to over cool the room it’s in. Depends on the size of your rooms of course and layout of them. It would have zero impact on downstairs.

Surely that means it's under-specced for the room?

 

[RJC]

Heh, thanks. I think I might need to think about how much I actually want it done, as it’s sounding like it will be expensive to do properly!

At present I have one unit in my hallway upstairs which I use to cool my bedroom - I need to place a fan in the doorway and keep all other doors closed in order to help cool my room down - It does work and cools it down from 28c to 23c (roughly) but this having running for about 3 hrs. Bear in mind this is cheap unit bought from France.

The one I had installed in my dining room cools pretty much downstairs including the kitchen which is off the dining room.

Ideally if you want a room to be cooled its best having a unit in that room, you can get away with a communal unit but this can be clunky.

 

[happy_2008]

I use my dining room unit to cool my kitchen but thats with the unit directly facing the kitchen door.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

Surely that means it's under-specced for the room?

No, it does the room easily. What it can’t do are the other bedrooms on a hot day to any reasonable level, nor is it expected to. For one thing I want it to be quiet at night, it would be pumping air out all the time otherwise. As soon as I add extra heat with the PC or Xbox, forget it, it’s why I’ve added dedicated units to the other rooms.

 

[andy_mk3]

No, it does the room easily. What it can’t do are the other bedrooms on a hot day to any reasonable level, nor is it expected to. For one thing I want it to be quiet at night, it would be pumping air out all the time otherwise. As soon as I add extra heat with the PC or Xbox, forget it, it’s why I’ve added dedicated units to the other rooms.

Ah apologies, I misread what you said there. I thought that was the master bedroom alone

 

[b0rn2sk8]

To effectively cool other rooms, particularly over 3 stories you’d need loads of fans to circulate the air around the house which sort of defeats the point.

 

[uncle_rufus]

We don't do that, and it works okay (but like I said, one unit top floor and one bottom)

 

[Teknobry]

THE NOISE from the condensation pump is driving me crazy.

Here is the sound mine makes. Wakes me up and sounds like I have a toilet in my bedroom.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p3uwisj3s6mhyin/Condensation Pump with bubbling.m4a?dl=0

The engineer is coming on Monday. I spoke to the boss today who said that all pumps were noisy but that they could move it to the guest bedroom room. I said that was great but what about when I had a guest over.

Basically it's fairly intolerable with three of these suckers happening all the time. He said it can be alleviated by having a larger reservoir so it doesn't go as often but I don't think that's going to help.

I suspect it might be *hard* to use gravity but not impossible and they might just be reticent to put in the work.
Either that or perhaps there's a pump that's silent.

IT LITERALLY JUST HAPPENED AGAIN IN MY LIVING ROOM

I had an issue like that with the unit in the bedroom. The problem was the reservoir had slipped and was sat at an angle, so it was activating every few minutes. The pump was touching the casing of the air con unit and the vibration was so loud.
I ended up opening the unit and running a pipe from the reservoir to a bucket on the floor just so I could sleep until the installer was able to come back a few days later

He was able to move the pump into the loft and put some sound deadening material around it which cured the problem for me.... until a week later when it suddenly started making a racket again. Opened the unit and the pipe to the pump had moved slightly and was touching the plastic. Secured it again and it's been fine since.

 

[James Peach]

I had an issue like that with the unit in the bedroom. The problem was the reservoir had slipped and was sat at an angle, so it was activating every few minutes. The pump was touching the casing of the air con unit and the vibration was so loud.
I ended up opening the unit and running a pipe from the reservoir to a bucket on the floor just so I could sleep until the installer was able to come back a few days later

He was able to move the pump into the loft and put some sound deadening material around it which cured the problem for me.... until a week later when it suddenly started making a racket again. Opened the unit and the pipe to the pump had moved slightly and was touching the plastic. Secured it again and it's been fine since.

Well the guy came round and he poured some water into a unit and immediately it made the horrible sound and he acknowledged that it was definitely not meant to sound that way.

He had a larger pump that he was going to install but I was pushing for the blue diamond even though he clearly wasn't a fan/didn't want to do it. We were at an impasse. Then, following several cups of tea and a few biscuits, he proceeded to solve all the problems without need of pumps.

He began with the bedroom, taking out the pump and moving the water out using a cutting edge technical process he called "gravity." One pump was down, two more to go. We had another biscuit.

On top of a ladder surveying the lay of the land he called down, "James, I think I've solved your problem," and pointed out what they'd missed before which was that the pipes ran basically right next to my bathroom plumbing. He took out the gurgling pumps and connected the AC directly to the plumbing Boom. No noise. Another biscuit and he was on his way.

I'm sort of astonished that they missed it the first time tbh. And to think of all the emails I sent quoting you guys saying things like "I *hear* there's something called a Blue Diamond which may solve the problem" etc etc.

In hindsight I think that their default is simply to use the pumps because it means they don't have to be concerned with gravity or the eccentricities of old plumbing.

 

[bazzabear]

Unfortunately my fitting today has been postponed because the supplier's supply of units has failed. Looks like it's widespread, as he hasn't been able to find the unit he needs at any of his other suppliers currently either. He's going to keep pushing, and let me know when he has secured one.

 

[James Peach]

PS the Panasonic AC I find to be very good.

Complaints

• The app is awful and very slow. You do toggle a button on the UI and then you actually get a modal pop up that says "Sending Settings." Tbh I'd have assumed that's what it was doing had it not let me know.
  
  
• The app does not work with HomeKit so you need to find a solution if you want to control it this way. Here are the ones I'm using.

1. Homebridge. Set it up using a raspberry pi. It's a bit flaky though. There are a bunch of plugins. A Panasonic "Comfort Cloud" account will only control ONE unit within Homebridge so you have to make as many accounts (with different emails) as you have units. You will also need to make these accounts separate to the one you use on your iPhone since logging in one place under the same ID logs you OUT another place. Obviously they had to do this because it's a massive security issue. Imagine if anyone anywhere in the world could toggle your AC.
   
   
2. RF hub. I use a Broadlink. I've downloaded a comfort cloud remote that someone else uploaded and that seeeeeems to work. You can add Siri phrases to trigger the buttons. (ex: hey Siri turn off the AC).
   
   
3. RF hub with Homebridge. Pretty much the same as 1) but it uses a broadlink plugin.

A few problems I've found with this.

• The UI on the Broadlink App is not good.
  
  
• The UI on the Home app is not very customisable; everything is either a fan or a light.
  
  
• I've yet to learn what the hell the remotes are doing: see below

• The Remotes. What on earth are they doing. I spent about four years hooking up the units to my wifi and they kept failing. I realised that the remotes are the same for every AC meaning that when I went to turn one AC on, I would also toggle the other one off. This took a long time, too long if I'm honest, to occur to me. In hindsight I don't know why I assumed they'd be different.
  
  
• The Remotes. They have the time on them. Two of the remotes have the correct time. I have not programmed this in. I know not how they obtained this knowledge or why the other one has not. This really bothers me. Not knowing.
  
  
• The Remotes. I don't know but I think that there must be (I mean obvs there must be) some sort of communication between the units and the remote controls. (But which?). Are they sending the same signal each time I change the temperature by .5 degrees? I know not. The temperature changes on the display. But is that a local change? If I then use the remote for a different AC to move the temperature by another .5 degrees is the remote telling that AC to change temperature by .5 degrees or move to the position that the new AC remote is displaying. I am having trouble.
  
  
• The Remotes. I want to know. I believe the truth is out there and that knowing that truth would allow me to understand what signals to record and send from the Broadlink hub. It might also help me understand why, when I told the Broadlink to turn on my ac last night, it succeeded in turning it on but appeared to ask it to heat the room to 21 degrees. What signal did it send? I feel like Jodie Foster in Contact except no aliens, just ac units and also probably the book which is also excellent so not Jodie Foster but the character she plays which, like the remote controls, eludes me.

 

[squerble]

Are these split systems suitable for replacing your heating system? Ie. if you had 2-3 external wall units would that likely be enough to have a cassette in each room?

And if so, is this an efficient way of doing it? I believe using an air-to-water air source heat pump is the best way as it'd join up to your existing radiator system (though you may need to replace the radiators in some cases) or under-floor heating loops, and could also heat a hot-water tank. That said, you'd lose air conditioning this way and I think I'd realistically like air conditioning in at least 3 rooms.

Is the future going to be a combination of air/ground source heat pump systems with some split systems for cooling?