tl;dr: I have a through-wall sleeve that appears to have an extension bolted on to it, and I'm trying to get details about it and figure out where to get more and/or whether my new ACs will work with it.
Hi there,
Apologies in advance for the long post, but I wanted to be as clear as possible. I'm trying to get some advice here on what I've gotten myself info - the previous owners of our place did a huge renovation in ~2006 and replaced all of the through-wall AC units with Wallmaster (I don't know what was there before). Now we have a bunch of ~17 year old wallmasters that work fine and are tolerable, but are loud and vibrate a lot.
I saw that Friedrich was now offering ACs with inverter compressors ("Chill Premier Inverter") that can be installed in the wall, you can see the brochure here. The larger models have a through-wall option with the chassis removed. I called Friedrich, they confirmed that the units should fit without any problems, and I ordered a CCV15A10A and a CCV18A30A as a sort of test run to replace two of the biggest offenders.
Here's the challenge - for one of the sleeves, the AC slides halfway into the frame no problems, but then it has a hard time progressing, and I'm hesitant to apply too much force and damage the unit if it's simply not going to fit after all. With the sleeve empty, I saw that there appears to be a bolted on extension (mfg by friedrich), you can see pictures of that here:
https://preview.redd.it/3w2xaxwd3m0d1.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d52094af941c2f485156faa8dc5025f99043d066
There's a manufacturer label that identifies it as a Friedrich (at the top left) but the model number has been rubbed away (of course). The extension is screwed into the existing frame, and it's possible that either the dent at the top or the bent metal grating at the left side of the extension are making it difficult to get further into the sleeve.
To complicate things further we discovered that the second sleeve lacks the extension altogether and the unit sticks too far into the room for the structure it is in (longer story about radiator piping).
I tried reaching out to Friedrich, but no one has gotten back to me after a few days, and I'm going to call, but I thought someone here might just recognize this configuration and be able to direct me to a part number or specifications somewhere. I don't mind doing the legwork, but I have been unable to find anything specific that extends the sleeve out into the air (there are a number that extend into the room)
My questions are:

• Is this a common configuration? Is there a spec sheet somewhere I can look at?
  
• Should I expect that these ACs will fit? Is it the dent or metal wire that's preventing it?
  
• Assuming yes to the previous two questions, where can I buy another one of these so that I can put it into the OTHER sleeve and install the AC in there.
  

I'm happy to get someone here starbucks or an amazon gift card for their time, I just don't want to get on the phone with Friedrich and get advice that I am not 100% confident is correct. I trust reddit a lot more (I realize how that sounds).
Thanks in advance, I really appreciate it.

Good morning everyone, AcA here and I have a brief (haha) update for you this morning. I felt it was pressing to give everyone an idea of what I am seeing and feeling headed into the next epoch of space weather. What a ride AR3663/3664 were? Long before most of you showed up for the biggest storm in decades, AR3663 was trying to get there, only to be usurped by AR3664 stealing the show. Well AR3664 has now departed, and the sunspot situation is complex, but not as intense as before it left. There are certainly more spots and active regions, but we are missing one with significant complexity and size like AR3664. As a result, we can probably expect a quieter stretch of space...
Something wild just happened. Something that has happened numerous times since I have started this. Call it stupid, tell me I am ate up, call it woo woo, I don't care. I don't call it anything, I juste note its occurence. As I am writing this brief little snippet, X-Ray spikes, and topped out at X2.99. For the last 10 days, when I have seen magnitudes like that, I automatically go to AR3664, or went to I should say, but AR3664 is gone...so what AR is responsible? I can barely see the leading edge of the plage, but it must be respectable.
That is the beauty. Nobody knows. It is not visible and as a result has not received a numeral yet and we have zero real idea of what it looks like. However, we can extract 3 key details from this information.

1. • The sun is still very active - X flaring continued overnight with an X3.3 overnight and this most recent X2.99~ from a new contender.
2. • Something imposing is hiding behind the limb, and will be rotating into view, and appears that it will be X capable off jump street.
3. • The flare topped out at X2.99, but based on the signature, I would not be surprised if the actual flare magnitude is north of that. THis often happens when flares occur so far on the limb they are occulted by the sun. It affects our probes ability to measure it.
4. • The radio emission from this flare was over 1000 km/s. Wowzers

https://preview.redd.it/mg1mt1ugvl0d1.png?width=818&format=png&auto=webp&s=ebf33ff307f1bc8dde5b507717bd2a1b221077ee
Buckle up folks. Now hopefully you have got the drift. There is no certainty here. I think many people are forgetting one key fact about this game. Its comprised of two words. Space & Weather. Space suggests its distant, massive, and on scales far bigger than a human. Weather suggests its an interconnected and dynamic system of more variables than we can track or understand. Our brightest minds, best models, and best computers, cannot tell you with any high degree of certainty whether it will storm 5-7 days from now, maybe not even rain. If that is the bar for terrestrial weather, than what is it for space weather? I give you my take. I give you my analysis. I hope I am right, and alot of you are here because I have had a pretty good track record so far. Do not think for one second that I don't know that track record could fall apart tomorrow. I need you to understand that.
Internally though? That is a different story. My confidence is rising. My perception broadening and my understanding increasing. The beauty of space weather currently, is at some point you have to make a gut call. You read the same data as everyone else, and you make your prediction. The finer brush strokes don't always come out perfect, but the big picture is definitely coherent at this point.
OFFICIAL FORECAST - SUN
https://preview.redd.it/9bja58vvvl0d1.png?width=414&format=png&auto=webp&s=9bc0bf36701972c3c52f5e74e004db2bc937e34b
I expect a brief lull in activity affecting earth. Flaring may remain slightly elevated but we cannot escape the fact that AR3664 is out of the mix. The other groups are growing, but they are not growing exceptionally fast. That could change and we will keep close eyes on active regions. Here is a link to all SDO imagery with a few pointers
AIA 131 Teal - best for capturing the flash of flares.
AIA 171 Gold - best for capturing magnetic connections, overall activity, post arcade loops
AIA 211 Purple - best for capturing eruptivity during flares and dimming
AIA 193 Bronze - good for coronal holes esp, but a blend of 171 and 211 showing activity and a glimpse of eruptivity
AIA 304 Red - best for plasma filaments and prominences and eruptivity
The others are great too and have various specialities but the primary ones are above.
If existing active regions do intensify, the forecast will change. We cannot assume they will, although I think they will. The sun is active overall and is able to generate big flares from any location or sunspot group. Even though the existing are not huge gashes like AR3664, AR3664 had humble beginnings too. Even though the spots on the disk are compact, they are fairly intense. I believe the official forecast reflects this. Even with AR3664 off the disk and no longer listed, the M-Class chances are 75% (too low) and the X-Class chances are 40% (I agree). They are seeing the same thing.
OFFICIAL FORECAST -EARTH
WSA-ENLIL shows an atypical setup. There are some small CMEs in the pipe and we are passing through a solar wind enhancement. Not sure where it came from but the parker spiral action is carrying it to and through us. Nothing big out there right now though. CME production remains elevated, including several potential full and partial halo, but currently nothing substantial aimed directly at us. DONKI shows a minor impact in the coming days with max Kp3.
Our star has made its most prolific run yet over the past few weeks. Both generating massive geomagnetic storms on earth and massive flares. Yes, SC23 was more intense in every facet, but SC25 is not over. It has already far exceeded SC24 though and its not close. Get this little fact.
In SC24 there were approximately 48 X-Class flares in the entire cycle which spanned from 2008-2019. In the past 2 weeks have seen more than 25% of that total. In 2 weeks, we got 25% of the way to the entire total of the previous 11 year cycle. And that does not even count the years and months prior of SC25, just the last 2 weeks. I think Mr McIntosh can take a victory lap. He went against the grain, called this a big cycle in direct opposition to NOAA on the basis of his own theory. Bravo! Its not done. We are in solar maximum and that is clear, but what is not clear is just how max this max will be? Nobody can predict the future or what will happen tomorrow on the sun, but I can say that there has NEVER been a better time in all of our recorded civilization to get acquainted with and understand space weather. Not only because of the activity level, the tools available to everyone for free, but because we must be on watch. We are the watchers. If you are here, you know what is up. The rest of the world does not. They do not understand space weather and the think its impossible to do so. Too complicated. Well that is where you come in. Learn it. Understand it. Teach it. Its going to matter in the coming decades, and I would bet everything I own on that. Does that mean CE 2.0? Hell no. Don't immediate jump to extremes, but here is the simple facts. We hit extreme storm levels last weekend from not so extreme storms. It did not harm anything. No widespread damage, just some localized stuff. A transformer blew up in a city about 50 miles from me overnight. Don't see that often. Could it be coincidence it occurred as our earth is trying to process all of the excess energy and current coursing through it? Sure it could be, but I am paying attention. Seismic activity is sharply rising the past few days, with significant attention paid to the south pacific and the caribbean currently. Weather and cloud anomalies all over the place and in strange places. The link to cloud anomalies shows iridiscent clouds usually spotted in polar regions only, yet these are in Vietnam. Many other places too. Are you paying attention?
Coming Article Teaser and Open Letter
I am going to touch on my article that is in the works just a little bit. A teaser if you will because I think it needs to be discussed right now, but when I release it, you will need no less than an hour to read it. It will be comprehensive and supported. I am shooting from the hip here, but I do so from an informed standpoint, the same standpoint I want you to arrive at.
What does ALL of this mean? Should I be scared? Can I jump to conclusions about this? Stop it. One day at at time. We are not scientists here. Most of us have no degrees or letters behind our names. We come armed with logic and the powers of perception, ready to learn. We are in the observation stage. We are looking for signals, correlations, coincidences, anomalies, patterns, etc. We must all determine for ourselves the truth of the matter, with our own eyes, and it starts right here at solarmax.
Now let me get something straight. I am very excited about aurora chances and the study of this field. I have no reason to believe we are in imminent danger. I have no reason to believe that we are in imminent danger tomorrow, or any other time. I recognize that like many forces of nature and the cosmos, that the sun does have the ability to make life pretty hard here, as well as makes all life possible. I give it the respect it deserves, but I do not give it fear or panic. I give it logic and rationality. Logic and rationality tells me that something is up with our planet, and I am not sure its so easily explained by the current narrative. I see man made climate change used far and wide to excuse every development from earthquakes, length of day glitches, changing earths rotation, etc and who am I to argue? I have no degrees as I said. I am just a self taught dude who likes space.
But I would offer them a challenge. Find a way to attribute last weekends massive geomagnetic storm from some relatively low magnitude CMEs to climate change. Go ahead, I will wait. No one would argue that the CMEs from 2003 were stronger, yet the effects were nearly identical and anecdotally more intense. How did our Co2 do that? They will attribute it to starlink satellites or something else man made. ESA swarm mission will tell you that its only decreased 9% on average whatever the hell that means. How can that be, if its been weakening at absolutely positively no less than 5% per century on average with modern estimates much closer to 5% per DECADE. The average rate of loss is no longer reported and is a mystery and possibly a closely guarded secret. As a result, I have no numbers or figures I can give you that I can prove. I will offer you a challenge too though.
Look around. Do you see a pattern? Do you see an acceleration of "things"? Everyone does. Cant deny it. Climate change is a good candidate for it, but we must factor last weekends geomagnetic storm in as anecdotal evidence that something could be changing, quickly. Its not proof. We could not go to a court of law and establish it as fact without refute. Some could say the CMEs combined in an unusual way and it somehow drastically magnified the overall energy content into a single wave. Maybe that is true. I cant refute it with data.
But....we can watch for the next one. We will get another big storm? I dont know. But we will be watching. If we see another storm like last weekend from low end X-Class flares, that could change. Our argument could strengthen, but we must approach it scientifically and logically, even if we are not scientists. Immanuel Velikovsky said that the test of a theory should be the explanation that requires the least in the way of modification, qualifier, and assumption to arrive at a conclusion. Pardon my french, but fuck what the mainstream is telling you. I am not saying they are lying, but am I saying trust your eyes, your instincts. This is IN you. It is in us all.
Thank you for making SolarMax a top 12% space and astronomy subreddit. I am a modest and humble man, but we are doing good work here. I am moved and touched by all of the posts, comments, questions, articles, and observations. Someone made an excellent observation overnight about the possible sympathetic nature of the flaring yesterday on direct opposite sides of the sun that I had made myself, but not brought to your attention. I thought maybe the timelapse just made it look sympathetic, but evidently others noticed too. That is what this is all about. Again, I am an armchair analyst. I make no bones about that. I have no qualifications that I could point to that says I know what I am talking about. When I say self taught, I do not just mean this subject. I am self taught in life. I barely graduated high school. I was essentially guaranteed graduation because my high school could not wait to get rid of me. If you are looking for good grammar, punctuation, syntax, etc you will not find it here and ultimately qualified or not, the results and predictions will pan out and prove it or they wont. Either way I will not lie to myself about it. I have been preparing for this for months and I did not know why I was preparing, or why I felt making this sub was so important when so many resources already exist. I am going to ride that wave, but I expect you all to keep me accountable.
I am sorry this was longer than expected. I hope you can get the message and be an adult about it. I am not saying we are in trouble, but I am saying we need to be paying attention. If you want to freak out about it, I cant stop you. Arm yourself with knowledge, and you yourself will know, when or if it is time to freak out. Arm yourself with knowledge and you will not be swayed by twitter idiots and AI written articles which sensatonalize the topic and only give the worst case CE scenario because it sells. I realize now that its not practical to guide you through each event, that we will grow past that point, and as a result, you must teach yourself with the tools here and elsewhere. Not even just for yourself, but for the rest of the world who do not understand space weather and they need someone to trust. Why not you?
With love and respect,
AcA