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Old 01-12-14, 04:17 PM   #6
jeff5may
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It looks to me like what you have is a "mix-and-match" unit. Much like the automotive industry, the mfr's have made these mini-split units interchangeable. Terms such as "platform" and "brand badging" come to mind. Many different brands and models come from essentially a very few compatible units. The main differences are cosmetic, such as stickers and plastic bezels. Nearly everything is made this way nowadays; it's a product of lean manufacturing processes.

A good property of these kinds of units is that they are very robust. The digital controls these systems use are pretty much self-regulating. No matter what modules you rig together, they will all work with each other and do a good job of it. With your unit, the controller learns rather quickly that it has a small indoor unit hooked up to it and behaves accordingly, running at reduced power levels most of the time. The energy efficiency of this mode is stellar.

Looking at service manuals of a few of the various midea models, it seems to me that running the outdoor unit as a water-source unit will be challenging. It will be less of an exercise in plumbing than of fooling the digital controls. The outdoor unit was designed as an air-source unit, and has all kinds of sensors in it. The fan is brushless DC, and has a tach built into it like a computer fan. Depending on the model, the units have 3 or more temp sensors embedded to tell the controller about its environment. Outdoor ambient temp, compressor discharge temp, hx discharge temp (maybe air and refrigerant) are all monitored.
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