Dumb Question

Eric_U

I have sort of a dumb question and I don't know how to type it out in Google so I figured I would ask here. I'm building an all electric house in Central NY and had originally planned on going radiant. However, the cost of that got outside of my budget so I'm going to throw some pex in the slab in case I change my mind in the future. For now this means I need another source of heating and cooling. I absolutely hate the look of minisplits so my plan is to install a traditional split system heat pump like this one. My question is, in order to not containment the air in my home with the air in my attached garage, is it possible to put a minisplit head just in the garage (or maybe even a ceiling cassette type) and use the main house's compressor? Or would I need a separate outdoor unit for whatever is heating and cooling the garage? I'm picturing a wye splitter on a garden hose but for the lineset, but I'm not sure if that is a real product or not

Mosherd1

Yes! They actually make central ducted units that use a mini split compressor, and they vary their load like a traditional mini split. Look at Cooper and Hunter’s website, or pioneer to give you an idea of what is available.  That’s exactly the same thing I’m doing at my mom’s place, but it worked out to be slightly cheaper to do two separate units.  Cooper and Hunter is a private label Midea, who makes Carrier’s mini splits. 

mattmia2

There are ducted heads for mini splits too which you could use to hide them. Make sure you have enough capacity at your design temp, there will be tables that show how the capacity falls with outdoor temp.

GGross

I've designed a couple with LG mini splits using their fully ducted air handler for the house, and a high wall unit for a garage area on a multi head outdoor unit. If it is within the budget using multiple correctly sized outdoor units is the way to go though! most multi head units you have to dig into the engineering manuals to find this info but the actual capacities and minimum outputs sometimes change depending on the combination of indoor units that are attached, it is usually not ideal but can definitely work well if you take care with planning the equipment out!