The upstairs room is definitely one of our favorite places to hang out in the house.  Especially now that we have the nice bathroom up here.  The problem is that during the summer, it gets so hot in the room.  The house AC can’t cool the room without freezing out the rest of the house.  So, we decided to put in an air conditioner for the room.

One of the main requirements was that it be quiet.  We love to watch movies up here, and nothings worse than having a loud fan or other noise source that makes it so you can’t understand the words in the movie.

Also, the room also gets cold in the winter so we’ve been using a little electric room heater.  It would be nice to have something that could heat in the winter as well.

So we decided to put in a mini split AC unit.  These aren’t very popular in the US, but are used extensively throughout the rest of the world.  I had them in a couple of my mission apartments and I liked them.  Basically, it’s like a house AC system where you have the compressor unit on the outside of the house.  Except instead of having the evaporator, or cooling cools inside the furnace, they go to a wall unit.  The wall unit is very quiet since it’s just a fan.  The compressor is typically the noisier unit, and it’s located outside.  Additionally, you can run the unit in reverse in the winter and it becomes a heater.

Here is the evaporator, or the wall unit.

Here is the compressor with the lineset running up the wall into the attic.

The lineset is composed of a high pressure refrigerant line, a low pressure refrigerant line, electrical line to power the indoor unit, and a drain line to drain the condensate.

To give it a cleaner look, we ran the lineset inside a gutter downspout.  Kevin has been our amazing helper on most of our house projects.  He was in town for a missionary homecoming and stayed an extra day to help us do some of the two man stuff.

I got to spend some quality time in the attic doing the wiring and hooking up the linesets.

The AC unit is fantastic and easily cools the room.  Now we are able to enjoy the room year round.  If you have a single room that you need to cool, these units are perfect.