hey everybody my name is sam and i'm angela and welcome to our channel welcome back to the first
video of a playlist of series of videos where we will take you through the complete installation
of a multi-zone mini split in our mobile home yay this first video is gonna be kind of like a mini
split 101 where we answer some of the most common questions that we had whenever we first got ours
so first question what is a mini split great question a lot of people hear the term mini
split and may not know exactly what it is that's really happening basically a mini
split is just a heat pump it is just separated or split into two units there's a part that is
inside that's what blows the air in your house it's called an air handler and then there's
a part that sits outside your home and that's where the compressor the condenser and all the
refrigeration activity or exchange of heat happens many splits are capable of both cooling and
heating your home depending on your system it may be different but our system exactly can only heat
all the time or cool all the time it's not a bi-directional multi-compressor pump
because basically the heat or cool it changes the direction of the heat transfer
one of the other considerations or questions is why would somebody choose a mini split as
opposed to a larger traditional unit or just using window acs well over a traditional unit is cost
for us in a mobile home it was going to we were going to have to put in all new ductwork
underneath the house and which gets really costly and this is something that just goes
on the side of your house so it's not messing up underneath or anything like that
it is nice over the window unit because one it's not like impeding your views through your window
and it is more energy efficient and it cools a lot better plus many splits will heat your home in
the winter window acs not all of them do they are now coming out with new window units that do both
but not all of them do not unless you get really expensive okay so how much do many splits cost
good question and the answer is it depends of course at the time of filming this and doing
our research and everything which is middle of 2021 the prices for many splits range from eight
hundred bucks for a single small size unit up to probably four to five thousand dollars for
multi-zone big ones that run a lot of square footage for homes for our
particular unit which is three separate zones and runs about twenty seven thousand btus
we're looking at about four thousand dollar price tag now that covers electrical it covers the units
itself the line set covers the things that make it pretty that's what i would ballpark everything
all said and done it's very difficult to give exact price and costs because how you install it
where you install it and how long your runs are to your units is all going to affect your cost
for a three zone unit on our single odd mobile home ballpark four thousand dollars
all right so here's a question how do you know what size mini split to get
how do we know we kind of knew from the window acs that we had in our house beforehand um same thing
for how many zones we needed we needed one in the center of the house which needed the most square
footage the highest btu and then one in each of the bedrooms on either side of the house um a
smaller btu because they're not very big bedrooms so if you're not entirely sure or you don't have
the luxury of running window acs like we have for a couple years there are sizing calculators and
everything of the sort probably if i was giving you any advice get as large of one as you can or
you can afford because it's always better to have more than you need then not enough for what you
need it won't have to work as hard to heat with a higher btu and a smaller space right exactly
one of the things we did as far as researching this before we ever bought our unit for our home
was trying to decide and do a little cost analysis between
do we buy one big multi-zone unit or would we be better off buying a couple of smaller units
so in our case getting the one big one was the most economical but it also was the most pleasing
aesthetically we didn't want to have multiple outdoor condenser fan units going on here on
our property and even with you know if that wasn't as much as a hurdle we still have the problem of
we'd have to run more than one dedicated circuit to power everything and copper wiring and
electrical costs can get expensive pretty quick oh yeah in addition to that we were able to reuse our
electric furnace wiring and circuitry because we took out our electric furnace and that was
able to really negate all the electrical costs so that was a big driving factor for us as well
all right tell everybody about the various places they can buy these and their purchasing options
and where we got ours from well of course as in just about everything you can go on
amazon and find what you need you can also go to your local hvac place or some of the hvac places
online we actually chose to go through home depot on their website they had a lot of customizable
kits packages that you could buy and they had in stock the size that we wanted with
like free shipping wasn't it yep free freight shipping everything plus the
the kind of i guess layer of comfort or safety blanket we figured if we
had problems we could go to home depot we could take this to home depot and say fix it
as you said home depot did have a lot of customizable kits and that mainly was cool
because of the line sets the actual length of refrigerant lines to go from point a to point b
they had everything where you just pick the footage runs and it was just once and done
other places online retailers and such you had to figure out and had to add this set in and add
the line set and then the couplers and it just got complicated quick home depot really made it simple
okay for the viewers who may not know or of our viewers who maybe missed the part in the video
where we talked about removing our electric furnace and going through the whole rigmarole
that led us this direction tell them that story well first of all our furnace was from 1987
88 somewhere around there so it was not energy efficient at all if we could
visibly see a difference in our power bill just using the furnace overnight yeah we're talking
sorry we're talking 15 a day in additional electricity costs because we get daily reports
15 bucks a day to run that sucker so we had decided to go a different route
we contacted one of the really good hvac companies in our area to come out and give
us a quote on what a traditional unit would be as well as many splits for our home too
we were absolutely flabbergasted by what they told us sticker shock um for a traditional unit heat
pump that would sit outside it was going to be 14 000 we were hoping for like half of that we were
thinking like maybe 7 000 so yes sticker shock big time for a three zone mitsubishi unit it was going
to be ten thousand dollars which was still above what we were thinking for the traditional unit
so since we do diy for everything else we figured we would look out there and see what
kind of companies offer diy packages and that's when we found mr cool which was pretty much the
only one or the most notable well-known i'll trust spending a ton of money on right company
all right a little bit of a spoiler obviously for us to have all this information the
mini splits are already installed even though this is the first in the series everything's done
so we have the luxury of telling you and answering this question how diy is mr cool units in the
end really how diy are they it's actually very simple you don't need any special techniques or
i think the only special tool we really needed was a three and a half inch uh hole saw and that was
to go from the inside wall to the outside wall to run um the refrigerator okay all the stuff to run
everything through the wall otherwise it's going to be mostly tools that you already have on hand
yeah any tool that a average di wire should already have you'll be able to have to install
these as far as heaviness of the pieces and you know physical abilities to move things
your outdoor unit is the most heavy but luckily it stays on the ground and you don't have to pick
it up and move around much if you need to you could use a hand truck for something like that
or a dolly we call them dollies but i guess hand trucks the more universal term that's probably the
heaviest part it is outside of that you just take a step at a time and it really is a diy solution
it is which you guys will see with our future videos or the rest of the videos on this playlist
alright guys so there is sam and angela's mini split 101 primer consider it course number one
complete we've answered a lot of the questions we had when we first started learning about this
as well as give you some details on where to get stuff from and things of the sort there is a full
playlist linked down below that will take you through the start to finish complete installation
of the multi-zone unit in our mobile home so if you are here and you're ready to learn look down
below there's other videos that'll be linked down there very soon if not already we are by no means
professional mini split ologists but we have installed a system so if you have any questions
or comments leave them for us down below we love to read them and we'll try and be as helpful as
possible well guys thanks for watching and we will see you next time on the homestead see you bye