Mini Split Reliability

[Diggin It]

I've looked at a few in stores, but I'm not sure I can justify the cost. Funny thought considering what I've recently spent on another project that I hope gets rarely used.

I'm not interested in cooling the whole house and don't really understand the heat portion. Is it electric (heating elements) or does it use the coolant somehow?

On the cooling side, I'm more interested in drying out the humidity in summer. I only cool one room now with a 6K window shaker and usually have it set in the mid to upper 70s. I couldn't put a mini in that one room for various reasons, so it would have to work for a larger area by several hundred square feet. I'm not opposed to that if it dries the air and doesn't eat too many KwHrs in the process.

And I'm not really sure if I'd want a 110V or 220V unit.

 

[deezler]

^ ductless mini-splits basically just use valving to reverse the flow of refrigerant. You can think of it like running your A/C in reverse - instead of rejecting heat to the outdoor environment, you send cold refrigerant through the outdoor heat exchanger to absorb heat from the outside air. Which is why they really struggle when it gets down near zero degrees outside - theres just no heat to pull from the air.