Watch out, early warning. I’m actually going to post about the system and not just more pretty pics. You’ve been warned if you want to tune out and wait for the goodies.
So several months back... pre-pandemic, my best bud
@gig 'em and I decided to install mini splits in our fish rooms. I was rocking a portable AC unit at the time and he had a newly self-built fish room that was super insulated and it was still cool outside. But as things were warming up, we figured now was the time to improve our climate control for the rooms. Both settled on a 12,000 BTU Pioneer self install unit (because we consider ourselves somewhat useful in the monkey wrench department and both insanely cheap) and went at it.
He went full AC tech and installed his unit first. Seeing how he had just gone through the process, offered to install mine for me since I was buried under a toddler and a 3-month old and his first kid wasn’t due until later that month. I took him up on it and assisted where I could but mostly stayed out of the way.
Come to now, we've both had some variance in how well the unit tracked temp and maintained it. The unit seems to cool really well and its great that its super quiet, very efficient, and works reliably... minus the whole couldn't maintain a set temp we programmed it for.
Enter the external thermostat controller. I'm currently being the guinea pig and running a Ceilo Breeze Plus that uses an external temp probe and humidity sensor so I'm not reliant on the mini-splits thermostat anymore. Plus, it gives me current room temp/humidity stats as the mini split was not "smart" and I could not see that info remotely.
Interestingly, I set a range from 74-76 for it to maintain and it did a great job of doing that. One quick note, it would turn off the unit at 74 and I wasn't sure if long-term, that would be ideal for the units longevity if it turned on/off 12x/day (middle of graph below). At night I wanted it to run a little warmer in the room to save electricity but set it to "dry" mode to maintain a reasonable humidity. Last night it maintained under 60% humidity and kept the room a perfect 76 (end of the graph). I'll continue to run it in this mode and see what it does. Seems to be the most consistent mode to keep it at a certain temp without it cycling on and off continuously for now as I play with the different settings and see if I can get the same consistency in other ways.
