as well as providing cool fresh air of course.
Split systems do
NOT provide fresh air, nor do they exhaust stale air! All they do is move the room air through the evaporator unit, to either cool it or heat it, then they return the exact same air to the room. There are a couple of systems (Daiku, for example) that can provide a very limited amount of fresh air, but those are not suitable for studios.
These systems are much simpler than traditional industrial style systems with ducting etc. Just two small holes in the wall for the supply and return.
Actually, they are more complex than traditional ducted systems! Since you
also need those holes in the walls,
IN ADDITION to the ducts that supply the fresh air and remove the stale air... That's a lot of holes!
Those "small holes in the wall" are not for supply and return of air: they are for circulating the refrigerant between the compressor unit (outdoors) and the evaporator unit (indoors). There's usually only one single hole needed in each room, as both pipes plus the electric wiring plus the condensate drain are all bundled together, and all pass through the wall through one single perforation.
For a four-room studio it would be far cheaper (and a lot simpler) to just get one ducted mini-split that is able to handle the full load of all four rooms, and one single duct system that incorporates all four rooms. A lot quieter, too! Put the AHU (evaporator unit) outside the outer-leaf envelope, with silencer boxes on the supply and return ducts, then split the air flow to each room using a staged plenum, or motorized dampers (or both), and re-join the return airflow using another staged plenum, into the return silencer.
As Greg pointed out, you cannot avoid having two ducts and two silencers for each room anyway, no matter what system you use for the actual A/C. There is no way around this. It seems you might have been mislead by the mini-split salesman (or brochure)...
I'm actually planning to use two multi-split HVAC systems, each system will power two units (1 in CR, 1 in machine room, 1 in live room and 1 in ISO).
In other words, you would buy a total of six large expensive boxes, two of which are noisy compressor units, plus four evaporators, then run pipes and cables all over the place, in addition to ducts.... this is not a "simpler solution", not is it cheaper.... If you do it correctly, you only buy two boxes: one compressor, and one AHU.
The one I'm looking at sucks up condensation and dumps the water outside,
ALL air conditioners do that! Every single one, without exception. It's a simple by-product of cooling the air.... As the refrigerant hits the indoor unit, it expands into gass which cools the coils. The water vapor in the air condenses on those cold evaporator coils, thus extracting the
latent heat load from the room, and when that is done, it can also deal with the
sensible heat load of the room if there is enough capacity left over. Latent heat load and sensible heat load are the two components of the cooling capacity that you need. But first it is latent heat: simple thermodynamics. You cannot extract sensible heat until after the latent heat is dealt with. This is true for every single air conditioner ever made. The simple act of running the air over cold coils, automatically extracts the humidity first, BEFORE cooling the air. And if you did not do the calculations correctly for your studio, then the system will not actually be able to dehumidify the room at all (nor cool it properly...)! If the system is too small then you will use all of the cooling capacity just to extract the latent heat, so none will be left over to extract the sensible heat, or if the system is too big then you will get too much cooling and not enough dehumidification.
That's why it is so important to do the math.
If you choose a unit that does not have enough capacity, it will only ever succeed in partially dehumidifying the room, without cooling it, even when running at 100% duty cycle. So it will be overloaded, and will fail soon. And if you choose a unit that has too much capacity, it will cool the room too fast, will therefor NOT extract the humidity correctly (since the duty cycle will be too short), so it will be under-loaded, under used, and you will have spent way too much money on something that does not do the job.
Do the math, before you choose the AHU and compressor. Important!
This type of system seems fine for my needs, and they're quite popular in studios in the U.K.
Not a good method for making decisions about how to design your studio! What "seems" good is no good at all unless you do the research and math to make sure it actually is. And what is "popular" might well be no good at all for YOUR studio: just because it is "popular" does not make it right for your situation. Do the math, to make sure.
- Stuart -
Much better! I'm liking that layout. nice!
