Google Analytics and Youtube Insight are fascinating things to me. From these I can tell that my most popular youtube video is one of our Art Cool LG ductless heat pump we had installed late last summer turning on and then back off.
I have to admit the way this heat pump turns on and off is very cool. I didn’t know it did this before we had it installed, but if I had, I may have decided to buy it based on that factor alone. A few of the other factors gave me some pause (and still do to some degree). Chief among them is that the units we have do have a side button to turn them on and off, but that only places them into an automatic mode that has them move the temperature towards the range 68-74 as appropriate. For any of the fancier features, such as specifying if you want to have it heat or cool only and setting a target temperature requires a remote control. Even with the remote control, it seems you can only set a timer to turn the whole thing on or off, not set it dynamically to different temperatures during the day. No thermostat is connected, so driving it that way won’t work either. This has led me to the idea of building an arduino based device with an IR blaster of some sort to allow for fine grained control of the environment, but I haven’t gotten the hardware for that project yet, let alone started actual work on it.
As far as heating and cooling goes, our experience so far has been fairly reasonable. We got it late enough in the year we only cooled with it a little, but we did have it through the winter. As long as the outside temperature stayed above 25 degrees Fahrenheit, it has done very well at keeping our main living space and upstairs bedroom warm. We usually have it targetted at between 66 and 68 Fahrenheit by the way. The other rooms still have their baseboard heater. And while it runs louder than our baseboards, so we notice it on somewhat often, it seems to have used less power as advertised. We did have one cold streak where our temperature ran 12-25 Fahrenheit for almost a week, which is fairly unusual for the Puget Sound region. That week it did have a hard time keeping up, especially at night. Those mornings the downstairs had dropped to around 60 by morning, but warmed up quickly once other heat sources started contributing (cooking breakfast, tv, etc) and as the sun came up. That performance was in line with the specifications of the device, which is why we have supplemental heat in some of the rooms adjoining the living room/kitchen if needed, along with a fireplace as a last resort option.
