The attic bedroom
Finished in 1994, served by one lonely register, and unusable from November to March. A single head gives it its own dial and its own thermostat.
One head, one line set, one day. The most common single-zone job we do.
Ductless mini splits
One room, its own dial, no ductwork required
For the addition, the attic bedroom, the porch that became an office, and every house in this city that was built before anyone thought about where a duct might go.
Six rooms we are called about constantly
If one of these is your house, you already know which one. Lift a corner for the part people usually ask next.
The addition
Built onto the back of the house with the ductwork stretched to reach it, so it is always four degrees behind the rest.
Stretching an existing duct run to a new room almost never works. A dedicated zone does.
The 1918 radiator house
Beautiful, warm in winter, and with nowhere at all to put a duct. Ductless is not a compromise here, it is the correct answer.
Balloon framing with no cavity to run a duct through is the single most common reason we go ductless.
The home office over the garage
Cold floor, cold everything, and a bonus room that nobody wants to sit in for eight hours.
A room over an unconditioned garage loses heat from five sides. It needs its own source.
The bedroom nobody agrees about
One person is too hot, the other is too cold, and the thermostat is in the hallway settling it for both of them.
Zoning ends the thermostat argument more reliably than any amount of balancing.
The whole small house
A bungalow with no ducts at all can run on three or four heads from one outdoor unit, heating and cooling both.
A multi-zone system can heat and cool an entire small house without a single duct.
What a ductless install actually involves
Two people, usually one day for a single zone, and one tidy hole in the wall.
We work out how many zones you actually need
Not one per room by default. A load calculation on each space, because an oversized head short cycles and is worse at dehumidifying than a correctly sized one.
We agree where things go, before anything is drilled
Head position, line set route, outdoor unit location, condensate path. We will walk it with you and mark it, because a line set cover on the front elevation is a decision, not a detail.
A three inch core through the wall, and that is the disruption
One neat penetration per head, sleeved and sealed properly. No soffits, no chases, no ceilings coming down.
Vacuum, charge, commission
The line set is pulled to a deep vacuum and held, not just purged. Then charge is verified, the head is set up for the room, and we hand you the remote and actually explain it.
Mini split questions
Do mini splits heat as well as cool?
Yes, and in Minnesota the heating is the more interesting half. A cold-climate ductless head keeps producing useful heat well below zero. For a single room that has always been cold, this is often the whole solution rather than an addition to it.
How cold can they go?
Current cold-climate models are rated to produce meaningful heat at 13 below and keep operating lower than that, with output falling as it gets colder. For a single room with existing backup heat elsewhere in the house, that is generally more than enough. For a whole-house ductless system we size the balance point deliberately and talk about backup, exactly as we would for a ducted heat pump.
Are they loud?
The indoor heads are quieter than a refrigerator on low, typically in the mid twenties of decibels. The outdoor unit is audible if you stand beside it and generally not from inside. Placement matters more than the specification: we will not put a condenser under a bedroom window if there is any alternative.
Do they look bad?
They are a white box on a wall, and there is no point pretending otherwise. High wall is the standard and the cheapest. There are also floor-mounted consoles that sit like a radiator, low-profile ceiling cassettes for a room with a soffit, and slim ducted units that hide in a closet and feed two rooms through a very short duct run. We will show you all four.
One outdoor unit or several?
A multi-zone outdoor unit feeding several heads is tidier and usually cheaper up front. Several single-zone systems are more efficient at part load, more resilient if one fails, and easier to service. For two or three heads we usually lean single-zone. Above that, multi-zone.
Can I put one in myself from a kit?
You can buy pre-charged DIY kits, and people do. Two honest cautions: handling refrigerant requires EPA Section 608 certification, and most manufacturer warranties require professional installation and commissioning. The failures we get called to are nearly always a line set that was never properly evacuated.
Tell us which room is the problem
A zoning visit is a look at the room, a load calculation for it, and a walk-through of where the head and the line set would go, with a price before you commit to anything.