Minisplit Efficiency

Hi Paula, 

We feel your pain. Our projects are located in a country that primarily stocks low-efficiency split units and price is aggressively promoted rather than savings. (However this is changing, slowly and there is now a 1 to 5 star system which attempts to educate people to think longer term.) First, you may need to push the contractor to look outside their normal suppliers, since there will be units available from the more premium suppliers, and secondly, educate your client about savings during the course of building operations. If its next to a warehouse then it sounds like the owner will occupy it, and that should be an easy "sell" since the cost difference between a less-efficient and more-efficient split can often be paid back within a couple of years and then the client has lower bills for the remaining, say, 10-12 years of the product real life-time, clearly a financial win.  There is no way to get around the fact that energy saving is a fundamental value for LEED, and the system bases itself on US norms where splits are conforming to ASHRAE.