Am continuously looking for technology that will let us run AC in the cabin from a solar-charged battery bank. Seemed like some good stuff in this thread to go back through when I can pay better attention.
I figure our cabin is analogous to an RV so what works there should work for us.
Ergo, Book Mark for the cabin.
One of the things that attracted me to the model that I initially asked about was the available operating temperature range, which was well below zero for heating and something like 120 for cooling. Several others offer extreme climate options but none had that wide of a range. Heat pumps have improved greatly since the 80’s and 90’s when they acquired a reputation for not heating or cooling especially well, and not being worth a hoot much below freezing, running the emergency heat strip and jacking out the power bill massively. I’ve got a newer Trane 16 seer on my house now, the only thing that gives it away as a heat pump is that it’s not a blast of really warm air when it kicks on, it’s sort of tepid and builds as it runs and blows out more.
Ping for an interesting ductless mini-split heat pump system with wall mount or ceiling cassettes that I’ve encountered, designed for solar:
http://kingtecsolar.com/products/solarcoolingsystems-k25ft-4/
They have both west coast (CA) and east coast (SC) offices, sound pretty established. There are a lot of home-brewed systems that guys are cobbling together using Chinese components, relabeling and selling, but this one seems not so fly-by-night.