Common Residential Inverter Heat Pump Systems! Pros and Cons!

Hey guys, it's been a while since we have done a live. Actually, it's been a couple of months. Let me get my comments going here. And there we go. The person you see here with me, his name's Jared, and he is the Senior Technical Advisor for ACIQ. Now, I fully intend to talk about other name brands, the pros and cons of the ones that I have installed. He's invited to give us more information about. ACIQ, which is a kind of a new name brand for me. I've only installed two of them. And so that's Jerry. How are you guys doing? Now, y'all know that I have installed Green. I have installed Bosch, ACIQ, and the Amana S series. And to be completely honest, of all of those, there's one that I really do not like because it does not offer the reheat capabilities. that the mini split style systems normally do and that's the the personal one I have on my house and that is the Bosch. It requires me to have heat strips and um I don't like that. It seems like a waste of an inverter system if you have to have heat strips and living here in the south. My favorites so far have been the ACI-Q and the Amana S series and um I'll start with the Amana S-Series, what I like about it. It has weld joints on it. You don't have to use any flares at all. And flares with mini split style systems, to me, are the weak point. If it's low on freon, that is the first thing everybody checks because it's the most common place to find a leak. As you see Jerry's over there shaking his head, it's very common. It's like 80% of failures or something like that are low. And I'll say like with the ACI cues. If we could get more of an extended copper so we could either weld on it or press to it and the quarter-inch fittings on our liquid line and gas line, that would be sweet. That would be really nice. A lot of people have been building their own stubbies to press onto it. We had a customer actually ask us that the other day. And you could use those brace-to-flare adapters, right? But it would be a little tight on the... three quarter inch one because of the rifling right so it is it is pretty tight because it's already pretty swedge. It'd be nice if it wasn't swedge but a lot of people have been making their own just a little adapter with that flare nut and sticking it on there. I've been seeing that a lot lately. And I do appreciate those little adapter things that come with the ACI-Qs. I used them on I'm doing this last install. It does help you bend a 9E or curve it into place right there at the condenser. It does make it convenient and it does keep heat off of. You're pulling down bounds. Yes. Well, I'd like to point out a second thing, too. Those flares that we have on those, I have not seen one that has come sketchy or weird or anything. I get a lot of line sets that we purchase, and, you know, step one is to cut the factory flares off, right, and restart. I've not had to do that with any of those, knock on wood, of course. But those are really, really good flares. Now I will tell you I have I have had to replace A flare on a grease on the condenser, the valve, because I stripped the threads. Mm. When I was threading on the nut, I could have sworn I had it started, but I cross-threaded it, and once it's cross-threaded, it's gone. You got to replace the whole valve. And I would recommend to anybody, if you can't screw it almost all the way on with your fingers, it's probably cross-threaded. So be very careful with that. Troy here seems to like Bosch, and like I said, the reason I don't really like them is because the ones I have seen worked on in one of my house do not have that reheat capability. By that, I mean injecting room temperature gas into the suction so that you can create high heat when it's very cold outside. So you're talking about the hyperheat vapor injection. Vapor injection. Vapor injection, yeah. So that allows these systems to release, you know, 95 degree air when we're very cold outside. Yeah. Eliminating the need for heat strips. Well, especially since they have the, you know, almost all of our systems have the blower off delay during defrost, so people don't even really notice when it's in defrost because of that. Yes, that is a very cool feature. If you can turn off the blower when it's in defrost, you'll never even know it. No. I mean, that is technology that's coming over from mini splits that we should have adopted a long, long time ago. And in fact, one of my gripes about these, like the old carrier Infinities and the train XRs, I forget, they were high priced, very high priced inverter systems that still required heat strips. And I felt like it was just a waste of money. I mean, like a $20,000 install and you're still going to have. 10 to 15 kW or something and it doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. So I've never liked those systems and but with like what I'm calling the reheat the gas injection my first one that did that that I installed was the Gree and they had a liquid receiver coming back from the indoor coil which is the condenser so you've got room temperature liquid and they were Basically, had a receiver and taking vapor off the top of that to inject into the suction. Do you know how ACIQ does it? Yeah, our mainstay CIQ brand actually takes, it has its own metering device and it goes through like a plated heat exchanger. It's kind of like a bunch of stacks basically. So then once it comes off the liquid side, there's an EEV that controls that. And if you are in a low ambient condition and that has been activated, your EEV opens up and it allows that high pressure side to go through the vapor side, straight bypass, and it actually goes directly into the rotary side of the compressor. So it actually goes into the third chord. That actually keeps the rotary style cooler in those low ambient conditions, which helps obviously with your heat that builds up in the compressor during that. Let me ask you, the heat sink that is going through, is it the heat sink that is cooling off the inverter board? No. So it has its own plate heat exchanger. It has basically like, it looks like It looks like, um... Two or three, there's two holes on the top and two holes on the bottom. However, the heat sink that goes through the inverter boards actually is just a liquid line. Um, it's it. The dedicated liquid side of that goes up through, just through the board, and then back out, whether it's going the other direction, forward or backwards. It's always going to be the liquid side, but it has nothing to do with that. That's always being used in the entire operation of the system because when we invert AC to DC, I produce a lot of heat and that heat has to go somewhere. So they, of course, have tried to put that into the liquid line. The liquid line is substantially cooler than the board is. That sounds very familiar to the Amana S series that I just installed like a month ago, a month and a half ago. I think they do something the same way. And I think Gree has also changed the way that they get their hot gas injection. I think they have a heat sink that they run it through as well. That liquid receiver, I mean, I installed that, man, eight years ago, something like that. So things have changed. Yeah, I saw your video of the recent Amana that you did with that startup. I was in the field for like. five or six years before I joined up with ACIQ and I ran into that as well during one of our installs and I was I was just as confused as you were with that startup procedure. Oh, yeah. Are you talking about the the tricks you got to go through on the thermostat? Yeah I had no idea. I had not seen it before either. I never really saw anything that went over it where it's like the secret passcode that's in their thermostat. Yeah, we need you. It's like the dyke and fit kind or whatever. Whatever, yeah, yeah. Let me see. I think this is the Mikey Pipes that I've seen on YouTube. That's correct. So they do have a private label, is that correct? Yep, yep. They have a private label with your company. We've done a lot of stickers and different things for Mikey's side of it. They do a private label for them by ACIQ. Well that's, that's pretty neat. Yeah, I've tried to help get your name and everything out there. Come up with something for that. That is a cool idea. We have our own developers, actually, that will help you with it. We have our own in-house development team. We have our own digital design team that will help you kind of work through it. I know our marketing team works pretty closely with all those guys to help kind of design something that you would actually enjoy. I don't know a massive amount about it, but they definitely do that. Okay. And I'm going to tell you something that I like. When I reached out to technical support, I had a local technical support person that I could talk to. I think he was based in Georgia. That's correct. And I'm in Georgia. It shouldn't make a difference, but when I hear somebody with a local accent, it does make a difference. I'm sorry, it does. It feels like I'm talking to my neighbor. He seemed very knowledgeable. Yeah. But there was something he didn't know that we might go over. Okay. And if y'all saw my video where I was installing the recent ACI-Q, I installed fully communicating system, communicating thermostat condenser, which means I had no regular 24-volt thermostat. For me, that created a little bit of a problem because of hooking up a float switch. The reason it's a problem is because the manuals refer you to a J7 and a CN23. I never found a J7. but we're gonna go over that in just a second and um apparently there are two CN 23s is that correct? that's correct. all right all right the CN 23 that I found was a tiny little marking let me see if I can show this was a tiny little marking I'm going to share screen and we're going to come over here allow this This board, let me see if I can make this bigger. This board that y'all see over here on the left, there's a little jumper. If y'all can see where my arrow is, that was the only jumper that I found and I tried to take it off thinking it might be J7. I never found a J7. That is not the right jumper. And over here where you see it says work, there's a little marking over here that says CNN 23. That is not the correct CNN 23. Can you see the board? I don't think we can. Oh, hold on. I don't think so. I'm even looking at the live stream. I don't see it. Just a second. Yeah. And then you'll see that it says, uh, can't see it. Let me get back over here. Can't solve. All right. So you didn't get to see any of that, did you? No. No, I don't think so. I think everybody else was just confused. Hmm. Well, anyway, there's a, there's another CN23. I'm going to put you back on big screen so I can see you pretty good. There is another CN23 from what you told me on a sideboard. That is covered with a black plastic cover. Is that correct? Yep, that is correct. Let me see if I can... I can't really see the mic. And... Can you see mine? Let me see. I can. Can you see that? Yeah, there you go. Perfect. Yeah, we can see that on the screen now. Okay, so... And what you were looking at was CN23 on the work terminal. It was right back there behind it. You can barely see it, but that's the... If you're just looking at the main board, that's the only scene in 23 you can find. You were talking about this jumper. Most of the jumpers are going to have this silicone on it. This is actually just for transport. So it's to make sure that it doesn't fall out when it's in transport. This is all from our quick stack guide that I had sent you and I'll show you something. Where actually we should have been looking was actually on the board to the right which is the board that's to the right of his inside of his unit on the right hand side and if we go down to here we can zoom in we took these high quality photos and added them to our quick start guide so it allows us to kind of zoom in pretty close here so you can see down here this is actually the j7 You can see it's this J7, and then you have the silicon coming on it right there. And then this is actually the terminal you need to use, CN23. If you look at the manual... The green terminal, like thermostat terminals you see right there, right? Yep, you can pop them out and you use the outside too. Once you remove that jumper, it'll have a let switch code. Basically you put them in there. Once the switch is closed, the code goes away. If it opens, it'll throw in that code. The only thing I will caution you about the wet switch, just a tip to everybody out there, is that if you are using full communication, for sure, this is 100% the way to do it. However, if you're using 24 volts inside or 24 volts outside, or obviously both, You might as well just break R. What we don't want to do is we have people who try to use this terminal and they do 24 volts inside and outside and all it does is shut down the blower inside and the outdoor unit never gets that signal. Well the first ACIQ I installed I did two stage 24 volt thermostat indoor and outdoor and I wrote red. Yep. And I got to say it now while While we're mentioning that, your thermostat wires on the... On the plug. I know. Confusing. I know, I know, I know, I know. The Quick Start Guide goes over that. We didn't have a choice on that matter of it, but we did draw it in this Quick Start Guide, which I can share it to you, that kind of tries to alleviate some of that. Here, I'm just going to add this real quick. There it is. So what we can see here is that if you wanted to use that 24-volt breakout adapter that you used, Basically, we drew all of this by hand. This was made with our digital design team, myself and the tech manager and the tech director, the guy you talked to, his name's Chris. We added the breakout adapter last because they aren't normal colors, right? Normal colors to the sense of like what you and I are used to. So we basically drew them, matched the colors, of course. They are labeled. Luckily, it's not that hard. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. But you got to read it because they don't match yellow for yellow or red for red. Yep. They don't use like what we would consider standard like these, you know, in the manual. These don't have colors. We put those colors on there for what you and I would perceive as that. Um... It's not very common that people use the breakout adapter, especially in matching systems in the video. In your case, if you just want to win 24 volts and then S1S2 outside. You wouldn't have needed to do any of that stuff. Thank Yeah, so I could have done a 24-volt thermostat and then S1 and S2 outside. Yep, yep. That would have been fine. And then you just would have had that dip switch, and you would have been good to go there. Well, let me ask you, one of the convenient things about the Gree was that I could use a Gree condenser on any air handler that had a TXV. you. Is that the same case with ACIQ? Absolutely. Our standalone coil has a TXV. What's actually kind of cool about the standalone coil, and if you match that with like, let's say the HPV that you installed, our standalone coil, the integration board, I don't know how much experience you have with it, but something I'm pretty proud of, and technology nerds like myself will enjoy this, but our integration board, our A2L mitigation board, basically on the coil, the sensor comes pre-mounted, the A2L sensor, and then you have the coil temp sensor pre-mounted. You mount the mitigation board, you run a return air temp sense to the return, and then what's cool is you can still use S1 and S2 off of our mitigation board out to your unit, and then 24 volts to the furnace, 24 volts to the thermostat, or you can even use two-wire on the communicating thermostat, all built into the integration board. So, yep, any condenser as long as it has the TXP. All right. Others have mentioned in here... Now, I'll look this up. ACIQ is an American company. Aren't they based in Ohio? That's correct. And there's been a little bit of criticism because products are made in China. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And I'll mention what I said a little while ago. A lot of the really technically advanced equipment is made in China. And some of, not all of it. I know there's some made over here. Because it's made over there, I think your products are less expensive than some of the others. I'm not incorrect there, am I? No, I would completely agree with that. You know, Mikey brings this up quite a bit as far as like cutting out the middleman. As you start to kind of look into other brands, obviously I won't speak on other brands, but a lot of them are moving to that, right? You know, Daikin, not made in America, right? some some of their condensers and single stage stuff is but a lot of their high inverter stuff is in train i know is using another side discharge that they're using a lot of people are moving to this and that's becoming kind of the standard so cutting out the middleman in the sense is where a lot of our contractors are really really seeing a lot of value in the pricing and in the service our technical support team is based solely in america we've got about Six or eight techs in-house, I would say, me and the tech manager as well. You talk to the director. He's in Georgia. Thank And then we have a couple of other remote employees. We've got one in Texas, one in Chicago. I'll go. So they're kind of scattered all over the place, but most of our stuff is all in-house. However, we are all based in America. We'll be speaking to Americans when you need help. Same thing with our customer service. you. Our customer service team is all in America as well. I can concur with that. Everybody I have dealt with through the whole process has been here in the United States. Yeah. Okay. Fellow YouTuber from South Carolina here with us. Hey, Ted. All right there's one thing I want to address about the inverter systems that a lot of contractors have in the back of their mind and even homeowners. I have criticized other name brands for doing the same thing but it's almost inevitable with the inverter systems and that is the requirement for OEM parts. It's not like we can go in and change a contactor or a capacitor and sometimes it's even really hard just to change a blower motor. You have to have OEM parts, which drives up the price of repairs. So are there any steps that you know of to help alleviate that problem? Not at this very second. I've looked into some universal stuff. I've done some research into universal things. But what you bring up is the truth, right? Especially when it comes to, like, the unit you were using. The unit you were using has a dedicated IPM that controls a three-phase blower motor, which there is no other company I know of that even offers that. So it is, like, completely dedicated to that. Yeah. It does kind of pin the contractor into that position. However, with proper planning and trying to honor that stuff, we go above and beyond as far as, like, the warranty goes. Like, we rarely, rarely, rarely ever backorder stuff. I'm We try to push as hard as we can to make sure going not only we have the parts, but we can locate them and get them to you in a timely manner, of course. to stop But it does make it pretty difficult if you don't go, you know, two-stage or single-stage. the Now, um... One of my criticisms of that has been recording For some of the big more recognizable name brands once their products go out of warranty now. the price of a part even an evaporator coil sometimes is so high you have to consider replacing the entire system and that to me is a little it just seems an aggressive tactic when it comes to making money on the company side and I don't sell those name brands because of it but with the inverter systems it's kind of unavoidable I haven't replaced a coil on the inverter system yet. They're still relatively new in my wheelhouse. But I can kind of foresee that it may be a problem. One of those boards in that air handler out of a warranty, I can't imagine it's cheap. What's weird is actually they're significantly cheaper than, like I'd say, the Carrier Infinity 5 stage or the Armstrong. That's definitely true. I mean, the last one I quoted at a company. For one of those, I think it was north of four or five grand. I mean, we sell the board through our authorized retailers, that inverter board in your outdoor unit for like four or 300 bucks. Um, really? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You can look at that. My boss is a one piece inverter board is like $1,500. Yeah, yeah, I think there are some that go up to like 900. But like the small board to the side, I know we were selling that like 250, I think. So a lot of them because we buy them in such bigger quantities, we don't have obviously that massive of a markup on that side. I don't deal with the parts world too too much. But yeah, I feel like you have that with anything. The only thing you can do in that case is try to find a coil that fits in the air handler and then try to move all the guts over to that coil. But it does pose a challenge. I don't think I would. I would try to keep it as close to my union as I could. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So yeah. I don't know if Bosch ever came out with one that has a hot gas injection. I know they have one that was some kind of better for really cold weather, but I don't know. If they did, I don't know about it, so I prefer not to even offer it because the option of being able to have a heat pump that does not need heat strips, to me, is just phenomenal. I mean, down here. When it gets cold, our heat strips run all the time if you have a conventional heat pump because under like 37 degrees, they don't really do much. I mean, I'm talking about a single stage PSC motor driven compressor heat pump. About 37 degrees, the efficiency drops so much that you've got to have the heat strip. Yeah, correct. And that is the vast majority of what's out there right now. So not having to have the heat strips, which runs your electric bill up in the winter. And here in Georgia, we are a heat pump state, which means electric heat cannot be the primary source of heat. So if somebody does not have some kind of gas supply to their house, they have to have a heat pump installed. So there are lots of heat pumps. Basically, unless you live in the city and you have natural gas, you probably got a heat pump. And some of the people that live in the city have heat pumps, too. We work on a lot of them. That's why people see me working on heat pumps all the time, because that's probably more than 50% of what we got around here. In fact, the only exception to that is commercial. Commercial property. Doesn't have to abide by that rule. So like a commercial property can have straight cooling, electric heat, but not all. That's crazy. It is. That'd be expensive. Super expensive. But wait a minute, we're about 30 minutes in. There were some questions I had about, we went over the J7, the CN23, and that helps me out because I still have to go back and hook that up correctly on my neighbor's air conditioner. I had to go get some spray foam and stuff just to finish up the job and seal up his platform and stuff. So in the end, I had ordered heat strips. It didn't need them, but... Yeah, it's good to have them as a backup, honestly. Yeah, I had ordered them just in case, for example, the heat pump quits on him or something, he'll have some backup. And that was my first experience with that thermostat, that fully communicating thermostat. It was really nice, had a lot of options on it, seemed easy to control. It was easy for my customer to hook up to it via Wi-Fi. Is he planning on controlling it with Wi-Fi right now? Actually, his dad is 97 years old, and that was something that he requested so that when his dad's having trouble, he can control the thermostat remotely. Absolutely. I know it can do two-wire. Do you see it can do 24 volts as well? Say that again now. It can do 24 volts as well that thermostat. It did look like it could yeah. Yeah yeah you can set it up for either way so if you wanted to put it on a different system you could. That and that white KJR 120N are the two communicating stats that we primarily use. Well that one that one was very nice um it was a little a little technical for my neighbor but but then again he was dealing with a mercury bulb thermostat before that. Wow. And that's why I mentioned, you know, I would like to be able for him to be able to use the remote. And you said that that might not really be an option. Is that correct? What I was saying was you, you could be, you should be able to point it at that. I know you can point it at the circuit board, right? There is an IR receiver and even that quick start guide points at it. There is a little like receiver for that. That's how you get into like engineering settings. That's what the remote really was sent for. Um, however, to point it basically at the air handler and control. Yeah. So you can get into some of the settings. You can pull some of the diagnostic data with the remote. You can change some of the engineering settings with the remote, like lockout parameters and a couple of other things. Thank The thermostat, I believe you can point it at that too. I'd like to try that in-house. I've definitely tried it with the light thermostat, the KJR 120N. I know it works with that. I haven't tried it with the new one yet. The only reason I would say I initially said I would recommend it is because it does get kind of odd, right? you. You set it on 72 cooling on the remote, and then somebody walks over and brings it up to 74. The remote's not going to know that, right? It's one-way communication with the remote. It's just I'm telling you what to do, and then it doesn't tell the remote when the change happens. Now, for Ted, ACI-Q is kind of a new name brand of inverter heat pump air conditioners. They do mini splits. What I installed the other day was a unitary system, basically kind of like the Griflex. Next, it's... Inverter driven heat pump heat mini split style condenser outside and just a regular little kind of advanced air handler on the inside fully communicating system and that's all I've installed of ACIQ. I haven't done any mini splits all I've done is the unitary split systems. I think somebody asked a little earlier on Do you have package units too? Yeah, we have regular package units, It's single stage, and then we also have an inverter package unit. Actually, we're demoing one of those from a different company right now. But yeah, we do offer an inverter package unit as well. And if you don't want to go inverter, we do offer single stage as well. Mini splits are kind of our bread and butter besides the central stuff that you've messed with, right? That's really, really, really common. We do a ton of the central stuff, but mini splits are really a big part of our market as well. I see. Now, I understand from the technical support guy that I spoke to a couple of days The WA and WH terminals on that thermostat. are being added to your mini splits so you will be able to put in a two-wire wired mini split one day is that correct? Yeah are you talking about like um the thermostat itself the HA is that you're talking about? Yes HA or HB I think that's what it was. Yeah yeah that's what it was yeah they it's an integration board that allows you to hook it up to the mini splits um however there of course is other wireless options you can go with there's a lot of good companies that allow you to control many splits right without any wiring so um think of like boulder or silo brief max or something like that that uses the ir sensor you can use those as well that require no wires um but yes the silo work with your mini splits Yeah, the Silabreeze Max is primarily what we recommend. I've been talking with Boulder quite a bit. Their integration has been pretty well. Me and Chris actually just recommended Boulder to a contractor who wanted to use these mini splits as just humidity control. There's a complex in Florida that... Doesn't allow people to use many splits in their sunrooms for temperature control, however they do allow it for humidity. Boulder's integration allows you to actually use the thermostat just for humidity control and you can set it up for that and it will turn on and off and cycle the unit as needed for humidity control. Something I have noticed with the silos or to me that's yellow You got to plug them in. Do they charge up a battery and can you put it on a wall? Is that correct? Yeah, from the ones that I've messed with, yeah, they either plug in or you run R&C to them. So a lot of people put them on a wall or they leave them on like a table. They leave them on like a table. They have a power source. They would make those where you could put like some AA batteries in it. That would be sweet. Yeah, that would be a prime product. I think that's my only. Criticism of the C-Logs. Yeah. Doing that does make it a little bit more difficult because you have to kind of get power to it. However, it does allow you to control it wirelessly, which instead of running two wires from whatever head you're running, it does allow you to control it wirelessly, which is really, really, really nice. Not just two wires from whatever head you're running, but a transformer in between somewhere. When I first saw the C-Log concept, I mean who's going to have 24 volts sticking out of their wall if you're installing a mini split unless you're replacing a 24 volt system and then you're removing the transformer when you do that. So um so the ones I have installed they're basically plugged in sitting on somebody's desk or something. Yep yeah I have one so I have um like I said we don't have our own so I use a company called Sensabo. and mine is mounted to the side of my dresser and it runs basically like a little usb plug behind my dresser and plugs into a power strip over there um and you can control it with your phone right turn it off exactly that's kind of like the sea level yeah i mean the only good part is too the sealer does allow you to run two wires so you could put it in the wall you could fish it somewhere right yes you could fish it in and you could run it through it doesn't have a smoke base you can mount on the wall and it does have a rnc terminal on it so yes you can do that Man, you've helped me out on the technical side on finding the J7 jumper. Y'all got it hidden. It's off to the side and covered in a black plastic cover. And I'm going to go back and I'll film it and I'll show everybody where this is in the right way to do what I was trying to do, which is hook up a float switch. Yeah. So I do plan on going back and doing that. And I'm probably going to keep it short tonight. I really just wanted to talk about the inverter systems and what I've installed and make sure y'all had an opportunity to come and talk about this product because I like it. I do. Yeah, we really like it as well. Static pressure and coil, you know. And I'll tell you something else I noticed in the manual, there's a lot of adjustment you can do with that blower motor with those dip switches. So if something's wrong with your static pressure or airflow, there's a lot of ways you can adjust to. I saw that. But thanks for coming on, Jared. I'm probably going to go ahead and cut it short. And thank you, everybody, for chiming in and visiting. I'll try to make this into a podcast within the next couple weeks or something. And I will unsuck.