Heat Pump

This Old townHouse had only baseboard heaters.  Well, there is also a wood stove but I've never used it.  I'd dreamed for a long time of installing a heat pump.  It was a project of a magnitude that I was never quite able to summon the nerve to tackle.  And then, one day, someone told me how to play musical breakers.  Now I had power and the project was in motion.

A couple punch outs, followed by a fast game of Musical Breakers, and viola - 240 volts were available (bottom of right breaker column).

Punchout Drunk Love

The next piece to fall into place was discovering that Lowe's sold DIY heat pumps (Heat Pumps for DummIYs).

The bracket, for the indoor unit, has numerous holes, to match a wide range of stud spacings.  The US standard is 16" o/c.  The studs I found, where I wanted to locate the unit, were 24" o/c.  Go figure!  The bracket was just able to reach!

After mounting the bracket, a hole is drilled, through the external wall.  The two refrigerant lines, the signal wires and the drain line will be passed through.

A plastic sleeve is placed in the hole.  

The indoor unit in place

The lines have been passed through the hole.  Foam is used to seal the hole.

I set the outdoor unit on two 20x20 concrete slabs.  They were small enough that I was able to move them, but large enough to do the job.

The outdoor unit, bolted to two 4x4s, each on a 20x20 concrete slab

Fasten 4x4s to concrete using concrete anchors

The hole for the lines from the indoor unit is about seven feet above the top of the outdoor unit.  The refrigeration lines are 16 feet long.  The refrigeration lines are insulated and bundled together.

The various lines on the outside of the townHouse.

The lines are enclosed in housing, in part for protection, but also for aesthetics.

The refrigeration lines connect to the outdoor unit.

By chance the outdoor unit was as far from the breaker panel as possible.  To bring power to the unit, I opted for wire in a flexible housing.  This was acknowledging that I lacked the courage to deal with rigid housing.

Wire in a flexible housing (12 gauge, 3 wires).  The 50 feet ended up just being long enough!

The conduit snakes into the breaker box using a hole from some previous owner's project.

Running the electrical wires involved drilling 3/8" diam. holes through drywall and also placing some support straps.

 

The conduit, snaking through the garage (prior to being strapped in place, near the ceiling).

The flexible conduit is zipped to an existing rigid conduit

The signal wire (from the indoor unit) and the power (from the breaker panel) connect to the outdoor unit.

Code compliant?  You be the judge.

I found an existing, no longer used, wire, passing through the exterior wall, right where I needed to run the supply wire!  This saved me the trouble of finding a location via taking measurements, inside and outside.

Duncan makes final inspection and signs off on project. 
That the outdoor unit is large is no illusion - it is the same body used for the three ton unit.

The system comes with a remote control but it can also be controlled from ones SmartPhone.

Insert the Smart HVAC Card in the Docking Station in the indoor unit

Control the heat pump from anywhere using your SmartPhone

This constitutes my most ambitious home handyperson project, to date.  Hopefully future urges will be more modest.  I had had good intentions of remembering to turn the system off, whenever the dryer or the stove are in use.  Due to senility I made the happy discovery that the dryer and the heat pump can both be on without blowing the main breaker.