How High Can a Mini Split be Installed?
Making the decision to get a ductless mini split system wasn’t the hard part. No, that’s determining where your indoor air-handling units will go. You want to take an out of sight, out of mind approach, keeping the units higher up on the walls near the ceiling if possible. How high can you go with your mini split installation?
The indoor mini split unit should be installed between 4” and 6” from the ceiling according to the experts at PowerSaveAC. If your living room or bedroom has higher ceilings, then measure up from the floor, installing the mini split again in the 4”-6” from the ceiling range.
In today’s post, we’ll explain why the location for wall-mounting your indoor mini split units matters. You won’t want to miss it!
The Importance of Placing Your Indoor Mini Split Unit Properly
You’re a little surprised to hear there exist restrictions on where you can get your indoor air-handling unit mounted to the wall. Why is that? For two reasons.
The first reason is the most important: to prioritize airflow. You decided to switch from standard HVAC heating and cooling to a ductless mini split system for the exemplary heating and cooling capabilities of the latter, right?
As well as ductless mini splits work, the indoor units are only as effective as their placement allows them to be. If your indoor air-handling unit is way up high, tucked into a corner, or otherwise inaccessible, this obstructs the indoor unit from doing its job.
The air-handling unit is supposed to take the cold, heat, or humidity to the outdoor compressor. The compressor is full of refrigerant that can cool warmer air. If you have cold air that needs to be heated up, the compressor can do that too.
It then travels, either cooled or heated, back to your indoor air-handling unit and filters out into the room. This happens continuously until the temperature in the room matches the temperature of the thermostat.
By disrupting the duties of the air-handling unit, you can get the misconception that your ductless mini split system isn’t working when really, it’s just where you put it.
The second reason placement of the indoor units matters so much is maintenance. Mini splits are not a maintenance-free solution. Every few months, the filters within the air-handling units need cleaning. If your indoor units are way up there near the ceiling, that makes accessing and cleaning them inconvenient, not to mention difficult. Also, you could accidentally forget to change or clean the filters for quite a while because the indoor units are so high!
Sources: