My house is extremely old, very big and difficult to heat in the winter.
The high ceilings, large windows and insufficient insulation in the walls results in a lot of drafts and cold spots.
There’s eighteen rooms in the house and the furnace struggles to keep up. In this area, the winter weather is long and brutal. We get high winds, tons of snow and temperatures down to twenty below zero. We typically run the furnace for eight months and the energy bills quickly add up. For several years, I supplemented the gas furnace with electric space heaters. There are certain rooms in the house that are especially cold. Turning up the thermostat managed to overheat the rest of the house while those rooms remained uncomfortably chilly. The space heaters helped to minimize the workload of the furnace, but they weren’t overly effective. I worried about safety issues and was unhappy with the look of the space heaters. I finally mentioned my concerns with a local HVAC contractor, who recommended installing a ductless multi-split system. We now have a single outdoor compressor that is linked to six air handlers mounted in individual rooms. The system is a heat pump and provides both heating and cooling capacity. We can cool these rooms in the summer and keep them perfectly warm during the most severe winter weather. The ductless heat pump is quiet, safe, and wonderfully energy efficient. It allows programmable operation, and we can make adjustments through an app on our smartphones. The installation process wasn’t invasive or messy and was completed in a single day.