It never occurred to me to extend the overhead door rails upward to provide maximum ceiling clearance when the doors are in the open position. Did you add side rail extensions at the bottom or did you custom order them that way?
I custom ordered them that way. The extra extension added a total of $225 to my parts and labor cost. Not too bad, but adds way more than $225 worth of usefulness to my shop over the next 20-30 years.
Also if I were to rough in a conduit for the mini-split refrigerate lines would you think a 2" pvc would be sufficient? If so do you think they would pull/fish thru a sweep 90 or would I have to have a LB type box for the change of direction? BTW your garage looks great.
No, I would think a 3.5" would be the minimum. We had to drill an actual 3" hole in the siding to get the lines out, and that was with a direct shot. If you are adding any sort of bends, even sweeps, I would add another 0.5" to 1.0" at least.
For a place that size you may need fans but can't you program the vertical damper on the evaporator to blow down to keep the air mixed up. Is the Shinco an inverter unit? I represent Fujitsu in my day job. It will be a ball cleaning that condensing unit coil in the future, but where it is, it shouldn't need cleaning to often...you hope!
Yes, it's a Shinco inverter. The price was very attractive and roughly half of all other major brands. Compressor warranty is 5 years, equivalent to the others, so I figure if it takes a dump, I can still buy another whole unit and be about where I would have been if I bought a major brand to begin with. I hope the retailer who sold it to me is correct in saying that they're quite reliable.
Question: Why is the outdoor unit there? Are you limited to how far the away it can sit? Would it be possible to use a similar unit and put the condenser closer to ground level or hide it around a corner?
Common question; I should have answered it in my post.
The garage is built on a suspended slab, meaning there is a fully open basement underneath it. To get any sort of hole drilled into that slab costs a minimum of $200, and then to get another hole drilled to the outside through the basement walls (the basement is 4 sides concrete) is another $200-300. Therefore, my plan was to somehow place the outside unit in an inconspicuous location so that you could not see it or hear it from my pool (which is very close to the garage) and that would not require having a huge lineset (would have added another $150+ to installation costs) or having to drill expensive holes. In other words, because it would have been ugly and/or expensive to do. This was the cheapest absolute way and actually works perfectly. The extra $100 (or less, haven't gotten the invoice yet) for my HVAC guy to get it up there was well worth saving hundreds more on everything else and having nasty holes in my shop floor.
