Planning ductless heads for a 1900s Palatka house, one room at a time

The house we are planning for

Take a representative house from the Palatka South Historic District, the twenty-three blocks south of downtown that were Palatka’s best address for decades: two stories, frame on brick piers, built around 1905. Downstairs: a front parlor, a dining room, a kitchen at the back, a central hall with the stair and a cast-iron gas floor furnace grate in the floor. Upstairs: three bedrooms off a hall and one bathroom. Eleven-foot ceilings below, ten above, tall sash windows everywhere, a wraparound porch. Cooling today: four window units, two of which rattle. Heat: the floor furnace, which warms the hall and nothing else.

There is no attic worth the name above the second floor and no duct chase anywhere. A conventional ducted system would mean soffits down every hall and closets lost to trunk lines. Ductless is the answer; the work is in the plan.

Room by room

Parlor. One wall head, mounted high on the interior wall above the picture rail, blowing across the room toward the front windows. The biggest cooling load downstairs because of the west-facing glass; the head is sized accordingly.

Dining room. One head, on the wall shared with the kitchen so the line set can run through the kitchen’s utility corner. Sized smaller than the parlor’s.

Kitchen. The hardest room. Heat from cooking, a door to the back porch, often a later addition with a lower ceiling. One head, placed away from the range so grease does not reach the coil, or in some houses a small ceiling cassette in the addition’s flat ceiling.

Central hall and stair. No head. The hall takes conditioned air from the rooms around it, and the stair carries it up. With the floor furnace gone, the hall’s grate is capped and the floor patched.

Upstairs bedrooms. One head each in the two larger bedrooms. The third, smallest bedroom shares with the upstairs hall through a transom or takes a small head of its own if it is a nursery or office.

Bathroom. No head; a good exhaust fan and an open door.

That is five or six heads. The window units come out, the sash windows close properly for the first time in decades, and every room has its own thermostat.

Where the outdoor units go

Two outdoor units rather than one large one: one at the rear of the house serving the kitchen, dining room and the back bedrooms, and one at the side yard behind lattice or a planting serving the parlor and front bedroom. Neither is visible from the street. Each one rides a pad or a wall-mounted bracket high enough to stay above any water that pools in the yard during a wet September. Splitting the load across two units also means a failure in one leaves half the house comfortable.

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Running the lines

Each head needs a small refrigerant line set, a condensate drain and a power wire, bundled and run from the outdoor unit to the head. In a house like this the routes are:

• Up the inside of a closet on the back wall for the upstairs rear bedrooms.
• Along the ceiling of the back porch, boxed to match the porch trim, for the kitchen and dining room.
• Up an inside corner of the side porch and through the parlor’s exterior wall behind the head.
• Through the floor and the crawlspace for a downstairs head on an interior wall, entering from below. A few blocks from the St. Johns that crawlspace rarely dries out, so any drain or line set passing under the joists gets full insulation against sweating.

Penetrations are one small hole per head, sealed and flashed. Nothing goes through beadboard, picture rail or a window casing. Condensate drains by gravity to the outside or, where the fall is wrong, through a small quiet pump.

Retiring the floor furnace

The hall furnace is the single most dangerous thing in most of these houses: an open-flame appliance in the living space with no modern safety controls, a grate that burns bare feet, and a flue that has not been inspected in a generation. Every head in the plan heats as well as cools, so the furnace retires on the day the system starts. The gas line is capped by a licensed fitter, the grate comes out, and the floor is patched with matching pine. If the house has gas service, the Palatka Gas Authority’s furnace rebate is an alternative path for owners who prefer ducted gas heat and have room for ducts; in a house like this one, there is not.

The price of a quiet exterior, described without numbers

A five- or six-head system with two outdoor units is a serious project, priced in the range of a full ducted system for a house this size but without the ductwork, drywall and soffit work that a ducted retrofit in an old house always ends up needing. Financing spreads it into monthly payments. A high-efficiency ductless heat pump may qualify for the utility rebate on your meter, FPL inside the city for most addresses; we confirm program rules and enrollment status before quoting. [[CONFIRM WITH JERRY]] Against the running cost of four window units and a floor furnace, the power bill drops from the first month.

Permits, review and the schedule

The city permits mechanical and gas work, and we pull the permits. Historic review, where it applies, is about what is visible from the street, which this plan avoids. Install is typically two days for a house like this one, with the heads mounted and lines run on day one and the outdoor units connected, evacuated and started on day two. The house is never without cooling overnight in summer; the window units stay in until the heads are running.