Heat pumps and mini splits in Cordata

The houses in Cordata

Cordata is planned-subdivision Bellingham: two-storey houses with attached garages on modest lots, long rows of townhomes, and a lot of purpose-built apartment product serving Whatcom Community College. Construction is slab or shallow crawlspace, engineered floor systems, and a mechanical closet or garage-wall furnace location. Because most of it postdates the modern energy code, the envelopes are tight and the heating loads are small enough that oversizing is the real risk.

What is probably heating yours right now

The detached houses and most townhomes came with a gas furnace and complete ductwork; some of the later phases were built all-electric with a heat pump already in place, and those we more often replace than convert. Student-oriented apartments run electric baseboard or a packaged electric unit. If your Cordata home has a heat pump from the first build-out, it is now old enough that a replacement will be substantially more efficient at the same duct system.

What makes a Cordata install different

This is the most straightforward ducted heat pump work in Bellingham — the duct system is sized for forced air, the panel has capacity, and the condenser location is already established by the builder. Watch two things: the original equipment was frequently sized to a rule of thumb rather than a load calculation, so we run the numbers to Bellingham’s 19°F design temperature rather than matching the nameplate on the old unit. And the tighter subdivision lots put the condenser close to the neighbour’s wall, where a variable-speed unit running long and quiet beats a single-stage unit cycling hard.

Sizing for 19°F

Every Bellingham address shares the same code design temperature — 19°F at station Bellingham 2 N, colder than Sea-Tac's 24°F. What differs street to street is the envelope. A 1910s one-and-a-half storey with knee walls and original single glazing carries a very different load from a mid-2000s two-storey built to a modern code, even at identical square footage. That is why we run the load rather than multiplying square feet by a constant.

We know the streets

If you are near Cordata Park, Whatcom Community College, the Cordata Parkway retail corridor, we have worked nearby. Ask and we will tell you honestly what we have run into on that side of town.