Whilst browsing the Darty website for something else entirely, I happened upon their range of ‘climatiseurs’. I know absolutely nothing about these but found them very interesting.
Am I right in thinking that these are air conditioning units (maybe ‘conditioning’ is the wrong word) that that are mounted internally on an external wall and can draw air in from outside the house and either heat it or cool it depending on, perhaps, a thermostat?
In a small 2-storey house (46sq.m on each floor = all rooms incl. hall, stairs and landing), could a properly sized unit located on each floor replace an oil-fired central heating system?
In a nutshell - What are they and what is the scope of their use please?
As I get older I am finding that there are lots of things I know nothing about - but hey-ho - every day’s a school day!
They are reversable air conditioning units providing both heating and cooling. The technology is well proven and works. In theory yes to one on each floor but the Darty ad is a bit light on details, the important ones being which refrigerent? Some are being phased out meaning a potential short service life, R290 being a preferred refrigerent now. Also the units operating temperatures, not much use if its minus 5 outside and the units can only add a few degrees at that temperature. Also temperature compensation is an important feature as it means the units monitor outside temperature and can vary the compressor and fan speeds to match the requirements making them both quieter and lower cost to run. You would still require some servicing and regular cleaning of the heat exchangers so factor that into the running costs.
I have a reversible air conditioner mounted inside the house with the box on the rear wall outside. Its been very good so far, cools the house well at the moment with this ferocious heat and during the winter, acts as an internal heating system which soon gets the house to my preferred temperature. Its a Mitsubishi and installed by the local electrician when the house was built two years ago. So far my electric bills have been a lot less than when I lived in Bretagne all those years, had convector heaters and a log burner. I also have convector heaters here mounted in the bedrooms and heated towel rails in both bathrooms but it never gets cold here even in mid winter and a huge 3m window facing west also helps keep it warm (too warm currently so shutters down from midday until nightime). I will be having it serviced in September as required.
Yes, air to air heaters, they were explained to me as being like a reversible fridge. We have 2 in a single floor 6 room house and they work fine, though one room is facing west with alot of shade outside so is normally cool enough to only rarely use the clima function.
Before them we had one log burner roughly in the centre of the house which kept it all warm but the total cost of electricity is less than it was when we were buying logs.
The cheminee is still there in case of power cuts and when we had one last winter I lit it but the lack of control soon became evident when the house was way too hot for comfort.
We installed an indoor ceiling mounted Mitsubishi reversible air conditioner a few years ago. It heats and/or cools the living room really well, and it is very easy to adjust the room temperature, just as Shiba describes. The outside unit hangs on the outside wall. Both units are quiet compared with other air con units we have had in the past.
We’ve got one unit in every room, but seldom use those in the bedroom. They have 4 functions, heating, a/c, dehumidifier ( moe comfortable than a/c) and fan (usually sufficient below C35) Re heating they’re fast and effective down to -5.
So can recommend them on the basis of 12 years use but we also have a log burner
so do you have the external bit on the outside wall of every room ??
and to what temperature do they heat the rooms?
I know that 19c is not enough for us to be sitting in… and it gets very, very cold here during winter times… albeit not for weeks at a time… but enough to freeze our socks off
We have 2 at th front and 2 at the back they"all outside. We use them less now for heating as we now have a wood burner on the ground floor and a pellet stove on the middle floor. But before we got those the only time the heat pumps struggled to heat the large salons was in Jan 2012 when we -10 temps. I think they’re excellent, but like the poeles too.
However my wife could survive without me using just the heat pumps (she"s not strong enough to carry logs or sacks of pellets).
