This was MUCH harder than I expected… DIY Air Conditioning Pt 1

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– The unit's finally here for my DIY, home air
conditioning, on the cheap and, I made some mistakes. Not once, but twice. I actually ordered
completely the wrong kit. My warehouse staff was
extremely disappoint. And so unfortunately, I only
have the outdoor unit today. But that's okay because there's
still plenty that I can do. I can run coolant lines up the house. I can run a big fat,
tech cable to get power to the outdoor unit from my panel. And if all of this sounds like
something that I'm gonna have one heck of a time doing
unassisted, you're right. In fact, I wasn't even
moving this box on my own. (laughs) The one and only, Brian the
electrician is here to help. And help is what I need. โ™ช Brian the electrician โ™ช โ™ช He's electrifying and helpful โ™ช โ™ช Such a helpful man โ™ช – And do you know what else I need? To tell you guys about Ruggable.

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get 10% off your order, at the link below. (upbeat music) All right, so by three o'clock
it's a 43% chance of rain and by four o'clock, that
goes up to 69%, nice. Not nice. What that means is, we
should probably focus on the outdoor stuff first. – Yeah. – Okay, the tape measuring
competition with the like, having more tools than me thing, has gotten outta hand here. (laughs) You don't have to pull up
with a whole truck of tools. What are we gonna need here? This is some armor for
where the cables are gonna come down the wall, I guess. – Yeah. – Wow, what's that, like eight gauge? – [Brian] Yeah. – Dang! Whoa, that one's heavy. It's a good thing you didn't
throw this at my chest. (laughs) Oh man, now we've got
armor plus eight gauge. Oh wait, that one's not that heavy. Is this not eight gauge? – No it's eight gauge, it's
just a lot shorter length.

– I see that. What do we need this for? – Strapping on the outside. – Really? My wife is gonna have a
fit when she sees this running up the outside of the house. – No, no, 'cause everything's
gonna be running up, you just put this across,
then we'll only do two screws through your siding,
instead of multiple straps. Everything straps to this. – Okay. This right here, so
this is our suction and what's this one called? – That's the suction of the low pressure, that's your discharger
of your high pressure. – Got it, okay. So this is just in case the kit, which does include a 25 feet
of each, per ceiling unit.

It's just in case the kit
doesn't include enough, which it doesn't. I get the feeling that this
kit is designed more for like a single storey rancher
style installation. But because we're going
all the way up the wall and we're actually going
quite deep into the house, we're definitely gonna need some extra. And how much did all of this cabling cost? – About 800 for the materials. – 800 bucks. – [Brian] Yeah. – Wow, okay. Compared to what I was
quoted for air conditioning. – Yeah. which was 25 grand plus. We're doing real well. – Yeah. – Because the entire setup
for the, like the kit. – Yeah. – Was 2800 US dollars. – Yeah. – So plus another 800 Canadian rubles. – Yeah, yeah exactly. – I'm still at like four grand, Canadian. Which is, like a quarter of the price. Even after I paid a filming
crew to be here and like, watch us do it. – Yeah. – And I'm assuming I should
probably pay you as well. (laughs) Not bad. While I've been waiting for
the air conditioner to arrive and while Brian's been prepping materials, I have been getting my attic ready.

So one of the other issues with my house is that my insulation
was about 35 years old. And never particularly amazing. You can see there's actually
a little bit of it left here. And it's basically just like, kind of roped onto this skylight. Lots of gaps in it. Anywhere you have a gap in your
insulation is an opportunity to lose a lot of heat in the winter and have a lot of heat
come in, in the summer. So we actually had all of
the insulation in the attic removed in preparation for this project. So I've been running ethernet runs, putting in new security cameras. Doing all the stuff that
is really easy to do while you've got things
removed and really hard to do, once it's back in here.

Over on this side, is where
the lines are gonna come in. And then we're gonna have two
ceiling units here and here for the two bedrooms that
are combined into one. But that we may put
back together some day. We're gonna have one that
comes clear across the ceiling to right under where
Andy's standing there. And then we actually need
one more, way over here. You're not gonna be able
to follow me over here but I'm going to go over
into the front attic, where the office is. So that's where the computer
room and stuff like that is. One of the most important
things that I did for prep, was get lighting installed in my attic. It used to be, that there
was just one little like, desktop lamp that hung
off of this two by four. And then was plugged into
an outlet right here.

Instead, now we've actually
got four light sockets up here, so we can actually see what we're doing. Now, you were concerned
about the overall capacity of this panel. 'Cause it's only a 100 amp service. – [Brian] Yes. – You're allowed to use what, 80% of it? – Yeah, you have baseboards upstairs that this will not only function
as an air conditioner but it will also work as a heat pump. – Okay. – So, yeah, baseboards
upstairs we can disconnect, that you don't need anymore. And, then you were also talking
about going to a gas range. – Conveniently, the electric
baseboards are already a 240 volt circuit.

So that means, it's as simple as, I mean, should we put in, like a
switch, to switch between them? Or like, what's the plan? – As long as they're disconnected, there's no way they can
come on and you know, be a load right? – So what are we looking at here? – So, well, we need to
figure out which breaker is for your upstairs baseboards. – Aha. I spent an entire evening
mapping out this panel. Because the labels that were
on it before are terrible. Also part of the original
plan that I laid out on the land show, when I first
found out about these things, was putting the outdoor units,
so this is the condenser, in the eave's of my house. So actually I had intended,
instead of using a four-way, like a one to four, mini split system, I had intended to use just one to one, smaller outdoor and indoor units. And just like, mount them
in the soffits of my house.

Brian informed me that it
was really stupid, that plan. (laughs) He's being really nice right
now and keeping his mouth shut. – It's all I can really do, sometimes. (laughs) – I have to be nice to you,
I'm still relying on you to actually hook it up
right and not, you know. (laughs) Make my house burn down. It was really nice of
the contractor who came and put this in, to do it. Everyone else we called
was like, are you for real? That is the smallest, stupidest
job ever, I'm not doing it. They just kinda, kept putting
one little concrete pad here. But yeah, a couple hundred bucks, so we'll add that to the
tally for the whole project. – Yeah. That's not bad really. – Perfect. – Yeah. – So now what? – Well, now we get the lines
that came with this thing, see how wide they are and how
much room we're gonna need to run up the wall. And we can start cutting
pieces to mount to the wall and strap everything. – Okay. – All the refrigerant lines
come in, down on this side.

For each cassette unit, there's
going to be open discharge in the suction line. The discharge is small and
the suction line's bigger. So everything ties in here. It will be four separate
pairs running up the wall. Each unit also gets a power run from this. – Oh wow, that's 12 things
running up the wall. And then we also need the tech
cable to bring power to this. – Yeah. – That's lucky 13 things,
running up the wall. – Considering how getting
everything here has gone for you, 13 seems appropriate. – Okay, here we go. So this is the accessory kit for the cassettes that
we're still waiting for. A cassette is the terminology
for the in-ceiling mounted cold side units that are
gonna go in each room. Compared to, I forget what the
wall mounted ones are called. But I really don't like those. I think they look like a big wart and so I wanted to go
with the in-ceiling ones. Which is why I did that second exchange.

– Okay, so it does look like
this is what I thought it was. The ends of the valves here,
this is just a cover nut, that comes off. And then, you use an allen
wrench on the valve underneath and that's what actually
opens and closes them. – I noticed that A down here. – Yeah. – Has a fatter suction, than B, C and D. – [Brian] Interesting. – [Linus] Any reason why that might be? – I'm presuming, kinda from
what I've seen in here, it looks like, if you have
more than one of these, you can actually link them
together to increase capacity. And you can only link
them through the A set. – All right. We're gonna do 15 inch
wide straps up the house, that gives us two inches each
for the suction and discharge. An inch for the tech cable
and then another inch for this bundle, that's gonna
go from the outdoor unit to the four indoor units.

We're gonna have four of these. Oh hold on, I gotta fix
my ladder carrying form before you roll on this Andy. All right. There we go, oh yeah. Moving a ladder like a pro now. Here we go, yeah, yeah,
very funny, smart guy. (laughs) Well this is quite the invention. This is the, Brian the
electrician, cutting table. Okay. – So, actually grab a
file out of the truck, so we can clean up the burs.

– Okay, I'm assuming
that's gonna be a me job. It's kind of an assistant sounding job. Deburring the cuts. I'm not even pouty that I'm
getting the (beep) tasks now. I'm gonna have air
conditioning when we're done. – By code, you have to have
a disconnect close to these. Literally, you just pull
that out to disconnect. – Okay, cool story bro. – There's rubber feet for
this thing too, it looks like. – Oh, okay, neat. I guess we should put those
on or, does it matter? Oh yeah I guess, for vibration
it might be nice to have. – Yeah. – Okay, sure, why don't
we just put those on now then, I guess. – Then they're there. – Then they're there. Yep, that's 18 exactly. And that's 18 exactly,
hashtag nailed it, okay. What's this? – Duct seal. – This is duct seal. Oh, it's gotta be the same stuff then. – Same idea. – Yeah. Okay. Asbestos free. Wonderful, I didn't
wanna pay for asbestos. What can I do? That would be useful.

– Screws, washes and then. – Put those on the wall. – Pretty much. – Why don't I climb to the
top and get a piece of string and put a weight on it
and hang it on the wall. – That would be magic. – Okay, so where do you want it? – I'm thinking, kinda here, about. – It is for realsies raining now. Gravity always gives you a straight line. Whether the house is actually straight. – Remains to be seen. – Yeah, it's a whole other thing. This did not make this
easier to deal with. Oh, you're just putting it on
anyway, okay, fine, whatever. – Actually I was just
figuring out where it's going, so I can do a dab of this,
where we actually put it on.

– So you can put the cock in there. – Yes. Yes, Linus. – I can do this you know. I don't need supervision. I know why you're here. (laughs) I need somewhere to put the
strap and I'm sorta regretting telling you not to debur it. It's not too bad. 'Cause I got these nice
protective undies, lttstore.com. We need a disclaimer
on the screen for that. lttstore.com underwear,
do not actually protect against metal, sharp metal burns. Undeterred by the weather,
Brian's attached all eight of the lines to the bottom
of the air conditioning unit. All that remains for me to
do is, finish strapping these all the way up to the
soffit and then we can change gears over to electrical, right? – [Brian] Yeah. Pass them up. – Oh yeah, we haven't
even really looked at where this is gonna land us up there. – [Brian] No, that's
kinda why I'm thinking, if we just cut the hole in the soffit, that's where it's gonna
go through regardless.

– [Linus] All right, fair enough. Hello. So are you gonna feed these up to me? – I am yeah. Okay, I'm ready to feed one through. – [Linus] Oh, okay. Lemme know how hard you want me to pull. I don't wanna throw you
off balance or anything. – No, I'm fine. Good and that's it. – [Linus] That's about it hey? – Yeah. – [Linus] Well, these
definitely weren't long enough without extending them, that's for sure. – This last bits definitely
gonna be a little tight. Okay, we're just on the
last tiny little bit. Yeah, so now it's just tweaking. Got them, actually straight
and clamped and yeah. – Okay, I can do the clamps. – [Brian] Yeah. – Time to throw some
tech cable up the wall. – I think so. – These are the p clamps
we were missing yesterday. So you just hook them on there
and you give them a little, tighty tighten and then boom! It's connected. Thinking about cable management, we're actually going to put
yet another hole up there.

Because, if we want to
hook up the gas range, which we need to do to
have enough capacity here, then we're gonna need a gas
line coming down here anyway, so if we think about that now, it might save us some hassle later. So, instead of bringing the tech cable and the other electrical wiring down here, close to these guys,
the refrigerant lines. We're gonna bring them down this far edge, that way the disconnect
box can be right over here, without interfering with the
gas line coming straight down and then hopefully,
across the bottom there. – We are probably gonna
need you in the attic to push this through. – Okay. – And length, wire to this too. – And he undid all the work I did while he was up the ladder. – You mean this work? – Yeah. (laughs) I also ran the thing through it.

– Here we go. Well, now we got to strap
it all the way down. Then we put a junction box in the attic because we don't need the armored cable running through the house. Then we can run the
unarmored cable from that box through the attic and down
to the panel in the garage. – There's not alotta space
to work in there is there? – [Brian] No, especially for
the amount of wire that's gonna be in here.

– Yeah we gotta put in four
sets for all the cassettes. And then, this gigantic power. – Power for everything. – This is kinda ridiculous. – Yeah and, plus I'm gonna have to drill this out a little bit more. That's not gonna fit. Not thrilled about how it's gonna sit but, only have much choice. – This is so amazing. Just having your own like, work bench that you carry around with you. I think my bicep is bigger
than his forearm now. No, not yet. (laughs) Still working on it. Can I do anything useful? – You could strip these and
hook up in here if you want? – Okay. I actually, oh yeah,
I know how to do that. My fingers are sore already. (laughs) – [Brian] Really? – I strip any more equipment, we're gonna have to start
calling me, the stripper.

Hey, got them. – You didn't tie these in. – Yeah, I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know where they went,
what do you want from me? – Okay, so probably need one down here. Wanna be, make sure to follow the contour. Can you reach that one? – [Linus] Yeah, these aren't as stiff, so it's a little tougher. – Keep going. Little more. You're there. – Okay, great. That's it then, we're
done out here aren't we? – Yeah, all that's left is, what we need, the wet connector for the tech.

And actually anchoring the unit down. – Oh yeah, okay. That we can dom kind of, whenever though. – Yeah. – Okay. – Yeah. – We're headed inside. – Yeah. – Actually, it's kind of
a beautiful day today, wish we were inside yesterday, yeah. (laughs) – Look at how all that came up. We can put all the junction
boxes up on the two by's at the end here. Transition to the lumax
going to the cassettes. And to the lumax, that's
gonna power everything. At this point, I'm gonna go run the lines and just get them boxed.

Then we have our connection
points ready to go for when we do more wiring. – Now that we're ready
to tie this into the box, Brian's stripped the tech cable. Which involves taking
off the outer sheath, ripping apart the armor
with his bare hands. Cutting this piece,
stripping another sheath and then we've got the four
conductors exposed now. So we've got our, what
do you call them, for ac? – The color coding there is three hots but the blue we could mark
as a neutral, if need be.

– Got it. And then the way we're
gonna cable manage it, is such that I'm gonna
be able to put all my flooring ply wood back in here. And it's just gonna run up through that little gap over there. Yay! – So, yeah and then I'll strap
it, when we do the lumax. – [Linus] Beautiful. – Yeah. Am I moving or where do you want me? – There's good, wherever
you feel comfortable. 'Cause that's it guys. That's part one. The only thing left to do outside here, is to get that second
wet connector we need and run this tech cable
into the disconnect. But all this is all hooked up. All this is cable managed. And the tech cable is tied
into the box at the top. So now, we just play the waiting game for the indoor units. And while we wait, we can check
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link in the video description. So thanks for watching. If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe you should check out one of our other collabs
with Brian the electrician. Maybe the one where we installed
the charger in my garage. – Yeah. – That's a good one. – That was a hoot. – 'Cause we didn't film the
stripping the tech cable on this one but we did in that one.

So if you were curious,
what does it look like when he rips it apart with his bare hands, you can see it there. (laughs) (beep) – Okay. Well. – Out of an eight, you
know, where are we at? – Yeah an eight, yeah. I don't think you coulda
done it any better, that's the problem. (laughs).

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