ductless?

anyone have this installed in their home? Was curious as to price vs. central air

We have a pretty small cape. It's just one floor right now (LR, DR, kitchen, small hallway, and two beds/1bath). We have a finished basement but it stays fairly cool and we have two window units that were given to us by a neighbor that we use down there in the summer if needed.

Dh is about to start working on the upstairs with his cousin (it will be one large bedroom and half bath), and we are having someone come by today to give a quote for ductless for the upstairs, as well as the 2nd floor. We want to do one of the ductless units that runs both heat and AC for the upstairs because it will be a lot of work to get a radiator up there & we don't want to break anything up in the basement to access the steam riser. We figured since the heat will rise from the first floor, we probably won't need to worry to much about heat upstairs anyway. Will be nice to be able to switch it on from the headunit if needed, though. For the 1st floor, we want one that just runs AC.

Does anyone have experience doing something similar? Do you need more than 1 unit for the first floor? Like one in each bedroom?

Re: ductless?

A friend of ours did his cape with ductless. The difference in price was smaller than we thought. But there was no need to break walls and run ducts. The cost and time of repairing that was worth it to them.
Their house was always comfortable - so it worked well

I think you will need heat upstairs all the time and using that as your heat can get expensive. Electric bill wise. We have a cape and the heat downstairs isn’t enough to heat upstairs comfortably. We always have to run the heat there as well. We have separate zones. You should really look into how hard it would be to get the baseboards up there and do a separate zone.

ductless?

so we got the quote and it was WAYYYYYY cheaper to do central actually. Too many walls up in our little cape, and we would have needed too many wall units as a result. We are going with CAC and adding a recirculator pump to the coil on the heater downstairs that will run heat through the vents. We are getting separate zones though, so that we can continue to run heat through the radiators for the 1st floor and only run heat through the vents on the 2nd floor. I've heard forced hot air through the vents is very dry, and we prefer having the radiators heat up becauase when they're hot, they stay hot for awhile

Message edited 1/20/2018 2:06:45 PM.

Re: ductless?

Re: ductless?

We found the same thing. Ductless for my house would have cost a lot more than CAC. Incidentally, after we got CAC our electric bill decreased bc we had been using window units in several rooms and we had a large standing unit for the living room.

Re: ductless?

We have ductless as it would be impossible to put central air in our house due to the layout (3 different companies told us this).

It was literally the best $12,000 we have ever spent! Ours is also a heat pump so in the fall and spring you can use it to heat up the house and it is more efficient than our baseboard heating! I also love that you are not running the AC in every single room or even on one floor. During the day, we keep it on in our living room. And in the evening, we turn it on in the bedrooms. It literally cools down the room within minutes.

Re: ductless?