If you don\u2019t have ductwork in areas of your home, your options may seem a little limited when it comes to the type of home heating and AC systems you can have. Portable heaters and AC units don\u2019t really do the trick if you want to stay comfortable for a reasonable price. But renovating all or part of your home to squeeze in some ducts may not seem like a great option either, especially when you think of how much time that will take.<\/p>\n
Adding ducts onto a ductless home is not the only way to get forced-air heating and air conditioning. There\u2019s another way: a ductless mini-split system which many people associate with cooling alone. But there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding ductless systems, which we\u2019d like to clear up here.<\/p>\n
Ductless systems are not like the window units and room coolers you\u2019re used to seeing in many homes in our area. Window units are air conditioners that are inefficient, unreliable, leaky, and rather noisy. A ductless unit is something else entirely.<\/p>\n
Instead, you have an outdoor unit, just like you would see in a conventional central air conditioner. But you get an individual blower unit for the various rooms or zones of your house, rather than a central blower. No major renovations are needed; technicians only have to drill a hole in the wall to feed through a refrigerant line.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s some excellent news about ductless systems: they offer both AC and <\/em>heating. That\u2019s because a ductless system is actually a heat pump. It\u2019s able to move heat out of a home (in cooling mode) and transfer heat indoors in the winter.<\/p>\n Best of all: it heats a home efficiently (and cools it efficiently too). It\u2019s a more efficient process to move heat than to generate it, which means lower bills with this type of system. It\u2019s an investment, certainly, but the long-term savings make up for it.<\/p>\n