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I've had a heat pump in my home in the US for the past five years, and it's worked pretty well, but one of the things I've found frustrating is that either the
by mtlynch 3y ago
I've had a heat pump in my home in the US for the past five years, and it's worked pretty well, but one of the things I've found frustrating is that either the pumps or the installers assume you need to run every indoor unit simultaneously.
I have a 24,000 BTU outdoor pump and one indoor unit for the first floor and another unit for the master bedroom. After COVID, we started using our second bedroom as an office, so we wanted an additional indoor unit.
I knew that a third indoor unit would be beyond the capacity of our outdoor pump, but we would never need to run all three indoor units at once, so I hoped it would work.
The installer said that they can't connect a third unit to our outdoor pump. They claimed that the system maxes out at two even if only two need to be on at once. I couldn't tell if it was bad design by the outdoor unit or if the installer just didn't want to sell me a single unit instead of replacing my whole system, but I was disappointed.
- kcb 3y agoThe indoor unit gets directly connected to the outdoor unit for refrigerant, power, and communication. It's likely then that your outdoor unit only had 2 hookups.
- Symbiote 3y ago24,000BTU = 7kW, to save others from the conversion.
- sokoloff 3y agoThere's no thermodynamic reason that it couldn't work the way you want it to, but the physical connections and electronics controls need to be designed to accommodate that, either with direct connections on the outdoor unit or via a 'branch box' that serves as a connection point for both the refrigerant and electronic control circuits. It's most likely that the installer was correct in that the outdoor unit you had maxed at two and did not have a smooth expansion path.