Air Conditioners: Expert and User Reviews Prev4 Best Air ConditionersSmall Air ConditionersBest AC for Medium RoomsBest AC for Large RoomsBuying Guide 1,492 posts, read 5,781,931 times You've helped me out with my heating issue and I decided to go w/ baseboard heaters. [no ducts available, cheap electricity where I live,etc.] But what about PTAC? Anyone have these units? These are the kind many motels/hotels have. They are thru the wall and run off thermostats. Packaged Thermal Air Conditioner....has heat pump inside. Right now I have 4 window a/c units in my home (kitchen/livingroom/2bedrooms) Plus I'm looking into 5500 watts worth of baseboard heat running off 240volts. These PTAC units look pretty good compared to window units and baseboards. Do you know anything about these units? [PTHP are the ones w/ the heat pump instead of the electric heat strip so PTHP is what I am looking into] 1,543 posts, read 4,249,134 times I have two Carrier PTAC units we installed in add-on sunrooms (one built specially for the dogs, but that is another story ).

Anyhow I am not familiar with that brand but can give you some insight into PTAC units in general.air handling unit gmp 1. With the heat pump configuration you can remove the need for the baseboard heaters.hvac outside unit frozen 2. Since you will have multiple units you can easily control heat and cool in various sections of the home.harga ac portable panasonic di surabaya 3. When a unit requires replacement you can replace just one and not a whole, or major parts of, a fully ducted system. 1. For each unit you put in you will most likely require separate 240V electrical runs which will also mean having space in the main breaker distribution box, an electricians time and the cost of additional hardware, cables, etc.

2. By running PTAC units you can save some on your electric bills by controlling sections of your home but if you have a family that is out the window. Even with a heat pump these units will consume a large amount of electricity handling a whole home. 3. You will need to create appropriate sized openings in walls and properly brace them when installed. These can easily span across, and through, stud bays and will require additional bracing be added to make up for the lost studs. 4. Even the best units have the potential for leakage from rain entering the casing from the outside. Our sunrooms are designed to handle any of this leakage and it is visible when it happens. In your situation you can have leakage go undetected for long periods. Remember that hotels and motels usually have overhangs that protect these from rain, for the most part. 5. Because of the way they operate there will be air infiltration through the units casing and components which can affect your operation (make it run longer, harder) and affect your electric bill.

You will hear that these units are "Very well sealed". Fact is the seals are like anything else and wil degrade over time. 6. Because they are required to be exposed on the exterior side, to allow the coils to perform their job, they will require more maintenance in the form of cleaning regularly. I see you are in Vegas? I'm sure you have dusty conditions there and the coils will need to be cleaned more often. Keep in mind that you will have to be careful if you hose them down as you do not want to cause water damage to the home through the openings. Along with this the exterior casings are generally not screened and you can easily have bees, wasps, etc., building nests in there. 7. The interior filters on the unit will also require more attention than a standard ducted system. These filters can become dirty and clogged quickly, they are not meant to be left, in your configuration, for a month at a time. I see the unit you are looking at appears to be an Amana unit. Depending on your heating and cooling needs these can run you up to $3200 just for the units themselves (based on one for each you now have).

Add into that the cost of the electrical discussed before, the extra labor to create the openings, the cost of the labor to install them, etc., etc. and you start reaching a pricey solution. These units are good for their intended use which is mostly small hotel rooms, small additions (like mine) and very small residences when one or two would suffice. I would expect with four window units now you most likely have a smaller home, one story, etc. Have you looked into the cost of adding central heat and air? You can obtain packaged units where everything is located outside the home and ducted into the home and through the attic, if attic access and space does not allow installation there. 2 posts, read 13,243 times PTAC units can be a really good alternative, especially if you have a small place. Here is some good info on how to pick which size. It is pretty helpful! Help Choosing Your PTAC HVAC UnitsIn the beginning of this spring I started a project to give a facelift to my garage.

I was making progress the first couple weeks of spring, but because this is Texas it very quickly became unbearable to be in the garage. Spring may not have technically ended according to the calendar, but according to Texas it was summer time. So, finishing my Garage Makeover slowly slid down to the very bottom of my to-do list. But then I bought my arcade cabinet and I needed to work on it somewhere. Even though summer was most certainly still in effect, I wanted to make some progress on my arcade cabinet. So I moved my mess around in the garage and cleared out a place to store and work on the arcade cabinet but quickly realized that it’s just absolutely insufferable in the garage. The architecture of our house (and I assume, many in Texas) includes keeping the hot-water heater in the garage. Because of this, garages have to be insulated well enough to keep the hot-water heater from freezing over during our modest winters. In my garage, the walls, the attic and even the garage door have some degree of insulation.

Our recent trip to Washington state included staying at a cabin which used portable and window air-conditioning units throughout the cabin in place of a centralized HVAC system. Upon returning to Texas and working on the arcade cabinet, I began to wonder if it’d be possible to use a portable air conditioner in my garage. During an unrelated trip to Lowe’s I spitballed my idea at Pat to air-condition the garage. We’d both seen where people had placed window units in a panel on their garage door, but I use my garage door to park my car, so I couldn’t do that. There also aren’t any windows in the garage, which completely ruled out a window unit. On an impulse, I checked out their air conditioning units and felt like we could pretty easily run some ductwork up into the attic to handle the exhaust of a portable air-conditioning unit. We eye-balled a couple different portable A/C units and settled on a 10,000 BTU unit and we figured that the exhaust was about 4 inches and bought some various dryer exhaust ducts.

The Lowe’s we were at had some issues with selection, so we wound up buying 4” ducting to run up to the ceiling and then some 3” ducting in the attic to park the exhaust right near an attic vent. Unfortunately, DIY newbies like myself should never launch into a project on a whim. When we got home, we soon discovered that the exhaust ducting that came with the A/C unit was 5 inches. We made a couple different trips back to Lowe’s and Home Depot looking for 5” ducting bits and pieces and basically struck out on what we needed. So on a lark, we decided to use some things we found around the Lowe’s to adapt down from 5 inches to 4 inches and hooked up all of our duct work. At first, I thought we were geniuses. We fired up the portable air conditioning unit and instantly cold air was blowing in the garage. We took little notice of it, but the 4” duct snapped itself taut as it began dealing with the volume of exhaust being pumped out by the A/C unit. Within the first few minutes, we noticed that the air conditioner had shut off and it was on fan-mode only.

A few minutes later, it cranked back up and began to cool. A few minutes of cold air followed by a few minutes of fan only. The temperature in the garage seemed to be falling, or so we thought. We decided to go inside and come back out after an hour or so. An hour later, I went out into the garage, and it hadn’t cooled down any further than the hour before which I thought was unusual. Upon further examination, the exhaust hose had become disconnected and the hot exhaust air was just being pumped into the garage. We fixed this, then went back inside for another hour or so and checked back on the garage to find that it really hadn’t cooled any further. We checked the exhaust hose and realized that there was hot air leaking from the exhaust hose through a number of small holes. We also noticed that the hose was quite warm to the touch. At this point, we decided to go ahead and use duct tape anywhere we felt air escaping the exhaust hose and then to let the thing run overnight to see if it ever cooled down.

The next morning, I was hoping to go outside into a “chilly” garage. However, what I discovered was that the temperature was still pretty high. It was cooler than what it had been the night before, but the temperature outside had dropped more than the temperature in the garage. The A/C unit was still acting the same way, a few minutes of cooling and then a few minutes of hot air only. I decided to unhook the A/C unit and then run it all day in its more normal configuration: through its exhaust hose, which would be hooked up to one of our windows inside the house. I set the temperature down to the lowest setting and let it run for hours, and in those hours it never stopped blowing cold air. Based on this conclusion and a little bit of arithmetic (Hooray, pi!), we decided that we were foolish in the first place to try and adapt all the way down to 3 inches. We figured that our exhaust was too small and that the unit was overheating and shutting itself down. Furthermore, in doing some additional research, I decided that the 10,000 BTU Portable A/C unit probably wasn’t big enough.

Measuring the garage, it’s about 505 square feet. The information I found all suggested that at least 12,000 BTUs would be needed to cool that big of a space, and I also felt square footage was probably a bad way to be communicating that. Square footage didn’t account for ceiling height, how much direct sun the room gets, the insulation or the typical ambient temperature. All of those factors could dramatically change how much cooling a room would need. Having learned our lesson (hopefully), I returned everything that we could and went back to the drawing board. I decided that we were going to need a 14,000 BTU Portable Air conditioner, 5” ductwork for the exhaust, and some sort of insulation to prevent that exhaust duct from turning into a radiator that worked against the A/C unit by heating the room. Setting everything up was pretty straightforward except for the Speedi-Collar SC-05 5-Inch Diameter Take Off Start Collar without Damper for HVAC Duct Work Connections. With two of these, we wound up using a hacksaw, a drill, a file, some caulk, and a few nuts and bolts to create a flange.

That flange we stuck up through the bigger 5-inch hole in the ceiling. On the other side of that hole, we had affixed a couple 1x2” boards between the ceiling joists. We screwed the flange right up into those 1x2”s to hold it firmly in place in the ceiling. In the attic, we used the 5” duct, the 5” duct connectors, some 5” clamps and the pipe strapping to run the duct work from the ceiling to near one of the attic vents. Inside the garage we used all the same parts and some self-adhesive insulated duct wrap to insulate the duct and then we hooked it up to the duct that came with the A/C unit. All of this went rather pleasantly. We powered up the A/C unit and sat there enjoying the cold air in the garage. I’ve been doing my testing. The weather is a bit cooler than when we started this project; today’s high was only 95. I let the NewAir AC-1400H run all day while I was at work. When I got home, around 10 hours later, the garage felt nice, and it was a reasonable 76 degrees in the garage.