Combining a Traditional Heating System with a Ductless System (Video)

Mike Cappuccio with Jones Services explains how a ductless system can be combined with a traditional heating system. In particular, he talks about how a ductless system can save you money by supplementing your boiler.

Hi, I’m Mike Cappuccio with Jones Services. And today I’m here to talk to you about how to integrate a Mitsubishi heating and cooling system into your existing heating system. From a cooling side, we’re really not going to integrate it much at all.

We’re going to focus on the boiler side of this for the sake of this video. I mean, it can be used with a furnace, but for the sake of this discussion, we’re going to say that we have wet heat today, we have a boiler. We might have a perimeter baseboard in our house or radiators in our house. So, what is the benefit of this?

There is definitely a cost savings above certain temperatures. So, for the sake of discussion for this video today, we’re going to use above 35 degrees. So above 35 degrees, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to tie these two systems together, so they work in conjunction with the outdoor air temperature.

All right. So, how do we do that? All right. So what we do is, behind me here is what’s called the kumo cloud station. This is what would go in your basement, where your boiler is, and this would be tied into the zones of the existing home of where the wet heat is.

So for example, if channel one is serving the circulator pump for the first floor, we would tie channel one into the kumo cloud station to basically control that circulator pump on or off, based on the outdoor air temperature. For example, if the outdoor air temperature is above 35 degrees, there’s a little sensor right here that goes outside and it senses the outdoor air temperature. And it says, “Hey, above 35 degrees.” I don’t want my gas to run in that zone because it’s cheaper for me to run my Mitsubishi heat pump in that zone. Then, what it will do… I mean, you could have multiple indoor units in one zone. You could have four units on the first floor, let’s say.

Now that gets tied in through what’s called the kumo cloud. All right. So, we would put one of these little kumo cloud devices in each Mitsubishi unit. And basically we would integrate the two together. Okay. And tie them together, so above 35 degrees. It’s going to say, “Hey, put the floor unit on,” or, “Put the wall unit on,” or, “Put the ducted unit on,” whatever unit that’s tied to the Mitsubishi system will then operate over 35 degrees.

Now, below 35 degrees, it’s going to do just the opposite. It’s going to say, “Hey, turn off my Mitsubishi system and put on my boiler,” again, done through channel one. Now, we can have multiple circulatory pumps to do this. We have channel two, three, and four. We can do up to four zones of heating with this. So, if we had the second floor or a bathroom or sunroom or a basement might be another zone, same thing, we would just tie those into the kumo cloud station to operate above and below a certain temperature. It would tell the system what to do.

Now, there’s also some other ways that we can tie the two systems together, as well. There is another system that is not really from Mitsubishi electric system, where you can use your traditional thermostat. So, if you have a thermostat in your home now, it is hooked up to wifi and it is compatible with what we call IFTT. IFTT stands for If This Then That.

Basically, what that does is the same thing, above 35 it turns something off and below 35 it turns something off. So, it’s basically turning on and off a switch to tell this what to do, but it’s doing it through the cloud is what it’s doing. So, you don’t need the Mitsubishi kumo cloud station. It really depends on how your home is, how the integrated controls are going to work and how we would put those into your home for what is the best solution for how we would do it.

But it’s absolutely cost-effective to use the heat pump over a certain temperature in certain areas of your home, because it’s more efficient to run that. Now, if you had oil heat in those homes or electric heat in those homes, you might have electric baseboard in zones, and it’s definitely more efficient to heat with a heat pump than it is electric baseboard, because the cost per million on BTU is much less with an air source heat pump than it is with a traditional electric baseboard heater.

Again, it’s the same thing with oil heat. If you have oil heat in those areas, the cost of oil fluctuates up and down, it is definitely cost per million BTU. Below 20 degrees is about where the oil is more efficient on this. Above 20 degrees, depending on the cost of oil, again, which system you’re going to operate. So, you definitely can get more information from us on this, but a great way to bring the two systems together for cost-efficiency is try to save some money.