We did a small remodel in our house where we cut a larger room in two so that we could create an area for storage of wine. In the room we have one duct in the floor for heating that I knew eventually I wanted to use for the cooling of the room. The challenge came as we started to price out cooling systems, and they ran in to the thousands. I think I have a solution, all the parts are ordered, and I will let you know how it goes. Here is my plan.
First, I need an AC Unit. I settled on the relatively cheap, but highly rated (and quiet) Frigidare.
I could leave this in the window, but it just doesn’t have the look we were hoping for. I needed to move this in to the crawlspace area. I can easily build a rack for this to live on in the crawlspace. There is plenty of ventilation as it’s 6ft tall. I will then build custom ducting from this unit to the floor vent. But, the thermostat is built in to the unit. So.. how do make the unit shut off and on?
I decided to piece together my own system using the Eve Degree HomeKit room sensor. This gives me my remote sensing I needed.
I can use the Eve application to monitor when the room temperature is getting too warm, and I want to make sure the AC turns on. So.. Now to control the unit itself. I decided to stick with the Eve system since I could tie the automation together in their app. (HomeKit does not do remote thermostat automation the way I needed). Here is the wall plug I went with.
Now, when the Eve Thermometer senses the warm temp, it will turn on this outlet, feeding power to the AC unit. When the Thermostat gets to a certain lower temperature, the wall unit will shut off again.
Sure.. it’s a bit of a hack, but one I am trying for now to get the look I wanted, without breaking the bank. A split AC unit or Heat Pump was going to be a minimum of $2500 or more. With this, I spent the following:
AC Unit: $229.00
Eve Thermostat: $60
Eve Outlet: $50
Total: $339
I feel like it’s a reasonable price to try to get this working. If it doesn’t work out, I can always re-purpose all of the items in my house.. but it’s definitely worth a shot!
In the coming weeks, I will try to get the ducting build done and post an update.