Inverter Air conditioners with heating and cooling

[jlynch]

i am going to give this a shot. i bought heat pumps for my na unit 14 years. i think they are toshiba. a heat pump run the freon in one direction for cool and reverses the direction for heat. it works well. you set your themostat to auto, set the temperature, it will keep your house at that temperature. its common in the desert. the option is to have a cooling system usually electric and a heat system using gas. hope this helps. its a brief explanation.

the recommendation I had read was the level of insulation and air tightness of your home should contribute to a heat loss level of 2 Watts/Kelvin/m2 before you should consider using a heat pump. But here building standards are pretty much non existent, and with flimsy poor quality windows/doors, persianas which essentially leaves holes in the wall, vents in the roof....working around those obstacles seems difficult as with finding trades people with knowledge/experience in this area. would be interest to hear how you managed this.

 

[Rich One]

the recommendation I had read was the level of insulation and air tightness of your home should contribute to a heat loss level of 2 Watts/Kelvin/m2 before you should consider using a heat pump. But here building standards are pretty much non existent, and with flimsy poor quality windows/doors, persianas which essentially leaves holes in the wall, vents in the roof....working around those obstacles seems difficult as with finding trades people with knowledge/experience in this area. would be interest to hear how you managed this.

Suggest you purchase plenty of Burlete/weatherstrip rolls at the hardware store for $300 pesos a 5 mt. roll..approx.and cover all the windows and openings.

 

[jbeas176]

jlynch. heat pumps do no work well in cold climates. BA is alot like phoenix. freezing temperatures are the exception. in my humble opinion heat pumps work well there. if the wallls have a low r value and the doors and windows sre drafty, regardless of the system you choose it will work harder to maintain temperature.

 

[jlynch]

yeah, my point was here getting the basics right (ie drafts) is a challenge, never mind using high R value materials/designs for walls/roofs/floors and low U values for windows which keeps both the cold out in winter/heat out in summer.

In the summer here, in buildings with no insulation, how the high thermal mass blocks and concrete roofs hold heat and release the heat at nighttime - when it has cooled down outside and you have had the air conditioning on to cool the room, but it heats back up because the blocks and roof are releasing the stored heat from the daytime.

Although Buenos Aires Ciudad are trying to encourage sustainable construction since 2017, but I doubt many albanils here pay much attention to it.

https://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/sites/gcaba/files/tomo_3-_aislamiento_termico_edilicio.pdf

 

[Ries]

We have had mini-split heat pumps in several different locations for 14 years as well. For the climate of BA, heat pumps in general are great. In early 2020, we had to buy 3, for 2 different places, in BA. We worked with a very good installer, and bought them from a commercial supplier of heating and air- both of whom recommended we skip the inverter models. Yes, they are more efficient, and will use less electricity. But the experience on the ground, both from our installer, who repairs and installs dozens every year, and the distributor, who sells hundreds, was that the inverters were less reliable, and expensive to get parts for, and, at this time, not worth the money. Inverters are electronic, and expensive to replace, or repair. I own various electronic devices that have inverters, including some very expensive welding machines- so I am not anti-inverter in general. But the quality level and price points for very high quality, reliable inverters are more than most people want to pay for a heat pump.