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Fulmer Heating & Cooling Blog

Wait, I Don’t Need to Use Air Ducts?

ductless-blower-unitIf you own a home and you don’t have a system of ductwork in place, then chances are that you are making due with window unit air conditioners. This is far from ideal. These units are noisy, they leave your home vulnerable to intruders, and they can cost a surprising amount of money to run. Yes, they have their uses—cooling a small studio apartment, a single dorm room, and so on. For a whole house, however, a whole-house cooling system is definitely preferable.

Now, even if you have a new home being constructed, you may still want to eschew the use of air ducts. They can leak, they can take in a lot of heat from the surrounding, unconditioned environments, and they can compromise indoor air quality. The fact of the matter is that you don’t need to use ductwork to enjoy whole-house cooling, though. You can instead opt for ductless air conditioning. This is an option that more and more homeowners in Lexington, SC are turning to.

How Does It Work?

If it’s a central AC system, how does it work without ducts? Well, there is a central unit involved: the outdoor unit. It’s as simple as that. Unlike a traditional split central AC, there is not a single indoor AC unit that serves to remove heat from the air and circulate air throughout the house via ducts. Instead, the ductless system uses individual blower units.

These units are tasked with cooling only those areas in which they are installed. Typically, an outdoor unit will be able to accommodate up to 4 of these blowers. They connect to the outdoor unit via conduits that contain all necessary power, refrigerant, and drainage lines. Each blower is controlled independently of the one another by its own thermostat.

This is a huge benefit to those homeowners looking to save energy without living in reduced comfort. You can shut a single blower off altogether if you don’t need to condition an unoccupied area. You can maintain different temperatures in different areas, too, meaning there will be fewer squabbles about temperature settings in the house. Of course, there is also the fact that you won’t gain heat or develop leaks in the ducts, because they’re not there at all!

Oh, Did We Mention It’s a Heat Pump?

There are cooling-only ductless mini splits out there, you have a heating system like a boiler in place. However, most homeowners are drawn to the heat pump models, which are capable of reversing their operation. This means that they can heat your home, too. That’s year-round comfort in one convenient package!

If you’re not familiar with the way in which heat pumps work, they do not generate new heat to heat homes. They reverse the refrigerant cycle in order to draw heat out of the air outside, just as they do from the air inside when in cooling mode. This refrigerant is compressed to boost thermal energy and is then used to heat air in the house. Because no new heat is generated, the system is incredibly efficient when heating.

Contact Fulmer Heating & Cooling for all of your ductless mini split service needs.

 

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