After a busy, bustling holiday season, it’s time to buckle down for those damp, dark months of winter. While the Pacific Northwest is blessed with relatively mild seasons, we’re still banished indoors post-holiday with drying socks, mugs of coffee, and empty wallets. This year, Lacey’s Sunset Air can help with two of the three (though they’ll provide a coffee consultation if you ask nicely).
Since their humble start in 1976, Sunset Air now plays a tremendous part in our local community. Whether it’s through their ongoing commitment to education via projects at Roosevelt Elementary and Saint Martin’s, or through sponsorship of public events, their presence is seen in so many places. They even compete on a global scale; having recently worked with the engineering department at Saint Martin’s to create the western hemisphere’s highest rated LEED-certified building. But it’s their commitment to keeping our area’s homes comfortable and economical that sets them apart. Through the sales of generators, replacement windows, or entire building projects, Sunset Air handles it all.
One technology to save money, go green, and keep temperatures cozy is through a ductless mini split system. Also referred to as zonal electric heat, these heating and cooling systems require minimal installation (thus lower cost and smaller mess), cleaner air, are cheaper to run, and often come with a heating rebate from the utilities company. In our area, Puget Sound Energy offers a $1200 rebate for families who switch to this efficient technology and some add a federal rebate to that as well.
Ductless mini split systems are for combined heater/air-conditioning and use wall-mounted units attached to outdoor condensers. Each wall unit can handle more than a room; they’re designed for zones of your home or business. They connect via a small series of wires and refrigeration tubing to the outdoor condenser and as such only require a small hole for the wires to pass through.
This technology is ideal in manufactured homes, new additions to an existing electrically-heated home, or for entire new builds. With skilled installers like those at Sunset Air, a system can be built to ideally match the heating and cooling needs required. Because no ductwork is needed, costs are kept low, especially if existing baseboards are kept in smaller rooms such as bedrooms or offices. Some estimates anticipate an average energy savings of over $275 a year with a ductless mini split system.
Because our damp Northwest climate tends to wreck havoc on allergy sufferers, these systems provide constant fresh air circulation in conjunction with air purifying filters to keep allergens at bay. Ductless systems also use 25-50% less electricity, so between the savings on tissues and heating costs, next Christmas could be one for the record books!
Sunset Air not only installs these systems, they offer repair and maintenance as well. Because they come with heat and air conditioning in one unit, they can be used all year to insure ideal comfort. Technicians are able to install, diagnose, repair, maintain anything your system requires. Sunset Air’s Randy Norris praises ductless heat pumps as “one of the most efficient HVAC products available today because of a recent breakthrough in ‘inverter’ driven compressor technology. Also these units are very efficient because they do not require ductwork which if not properly sealed can leak precious conditioned air to the outside.” All of these reasons should put ductless heating and cooling technology at the top of anyone’s list of New Year’s resolutions.
