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Old 02-28-14, 04:35 PM   #3
jeff5may
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: elizabethtown, ky, USA
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Borrow a trick from the window shakers. They use a "sling blade" on the outdoor coil to grab the cold evaporator water and sling it all over the condenser. The hotter it gets outside, the better it works. Hotter outdoors + more humidity = more condensed water to feed the hot coil. That's how the window shakers keep blowing ice cold air even when it's blazing outside.

I made the mistake of not sealing up a hole I drilled in my drain pan last year. In heating mode, the water built up and froze in the pan. The unit took forever to defrost. To fix it, I drilled a hole in the pan, and defrost times took a nosedive. The following summer, the unit lost cooling capacity when it got hot outside. After taping up the hole I had drilled, the cooling capacity immediately returned.

With your mini-split unit, you can stick a drain pan where your indoor unit drains outside. Simply stick a fountain pump in the pan and plumb it to a mini spray nozzle that sprays on your outdoor unit intake. You will be recycling the cold water your indoor unit has produced. This is how the newer portable a/c units dispose of the condensate they produce. The water is dripped onto the condenser fan and blown out the window after being reheated by the condenser.
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