Installation of a GREE FreeMatch R32 2-Head Heat Pump in Beloeil (MRC de La Vallée-du-Richelieu)

The regulation says a minimum of twenty degrees. It says nothing about the maximum.

We installed a two-head GREE FreeMatch R32 system in a childcare setting in Beloeil, in the Rivière-du-Richelieu RCM. It is the first project in this series where the people who will live under the unit are two, three, and four years old—and where none of them will ever be able to say that the room is too hot, too cold, too dry, or that the unit is making a noise it was not making last week.

That changes almost everything, and we began by reading what Quebec actually requires.

What the regulation requires, word for word

The Educational Childcare Services Regulation is surprisingly brief on indoor climate, and what it says is worth quoting rather than summarizing.

For a facility—a CPE or daycare centre—section 30 states:

“The permit holder must ensure that: […] 2° the temperature of the rooms is consistently maintained at a minimum of 20 °C; 3° the relative humidity level in a basement does not exceed 50% in any season.”

Section 32, which describes the play area, adds that it must be “maintained at a relative humidity level of at least 30% in winter”, have windows opening directly onto the outdoors representing at least 10% of the floor area, and—as the first line of the section, and a lovely one in a city that owes its name to a viewpoint—“have at least one unobstructed window at all times to provide an overall view of the play area”.

For a home-based childcare service, the rules are different and less stringent. It is section 88 that applies, and it contains a word that the facility regulations do not:

“The person responsible must ensure that the rooms and common areas are safe, kept clean and well maintained, well ventilated, and kept at a temperature of at least 20 °C.”

The Guide to Facility Planning published by the Ministère de la Famille clarifies the scope of the threshold, and this clarification is crucial for an installer: at 20 °C, “it is not an average, but rather a minimum to be maintained at every point in each room”. The same guide recommends, beyond the legal minimum, a comfort temperature of 22 °C with approximately 40% relative humidity in winter.

A floor, and no ceiling

Let us reread what we have just quoted, looking for what is not there.

There is a minimum temperature. There is no maximum. The regulation mentions neither air conditioning, heat pumps, nor mechanical ventilation in the section on facilities. The word “ventilated” appears only in the home childcare framework, and without any numerical value.

In other words: Quebec law protects toddlers from the cold and says nothing about heat.

This is not a criticism of the regulation—it is a design fact that anyone equipping a childcare setting needs to know. This means that in July, in a south-facing room filled with fifteen-kilogram bodies, there is no regulatory threshold to invoke. The decision to install air conditioning is a management decision, based on judgment, not on a regulatory provision one could cite to a board of directors.

The only regulatory lever that concerns the unit itself is found elsewhere and is general: section 38.1 requires equipment and furnishings to be used safely and must not “constitute a potential danger in view of their nature, the place where they are used, and the presence of children”. We will return to this in the second half of this article, because this is the sentence that should determine the installation height.

What public health says—and what it refuses to say

We expected to find a safe indoor temperature threshold. There isn't one, and it is the Institut national de santé publique du Québec itself that says so. Its review of the state of knowledge on indoor temperature thresholds concludes that the literature review “did not, however, make it possible to identify a single, consensual approach that could lead to determining such a threshold”. Children are among the vulnerable populations identified; no figure is proposed.

Regarding air conditioning, the INSPQ is both more assertive and more nuanced. It presents air conditioning as an effective protective measure during periods of heat, with a thermal neutrality range of approximately 23 to 27 °C for a normally clothed person at rest. But the institute also recommends that air conditioning not be used continuously, but rather for a few hours a day, targeting afternoon peaks, and that the difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures be minimized. Finally, it warns of the risk of microorganisms proliferating in a poorly maintained unit.

We report these positions without turning them into operating rules, because it is not our role to tell an educator how to run her day. But an honest quote must tell the manager that the unit they are buying is not designed to run at 20 °C all summer, and why.

The gap between school and daycare

Here is the finding that surprises managers the most, and it is verifiable.

For schools, the government publishes targets: a daily average of CO₂ below 1,000 ppm aimed for in every room where teaching takes place, a concentration below 1,500 ppm that can be used as a satisfactory comfort parameter, relative humidity between 30% and 50% depending on the season, and an ambient temperature between 20 °C and 26 °C.

For childcare services, there is no equivalent target. No CO₂ target, ventilation rate, or maximum temperature. The only ventilation requirement affecting a facility is indirect: the Ministry’s Guide notes that the Building Code now requires a mechanical ventilation system in public buildings for new buildings, leaving the hundreds of spaces fitted out in existing structures entirely out of scope.

Two honest clarifications, because they matter: these school targets are ministerial objectives and comfort parameters, not regulations—we will not call them “the standard.” And the absence of a daycare target is not permission; it is a gap.

What a wall-mounted heat pump will not do—and this must be stated before signing

We have published this limitation several times and will not rewrite it: a wall-mounted unit does not ventilate. It recirculates the room air over a coil, introduces no outdoor air, and its filter is a coil-protection screen, not an air purifier. We established this in Beauharnois, and Longueuil used it to compile the list of refusals. The honest response to an air-quality problem is an air exchanger, not a heat pump.

In a daycare, this sentence stops being a generic warning and becomes an operational distinction. There are two problems in this room, and the unit addresses only one:

• heat and humidity — that is the heat pump’s domain, and it is highly effective there;
• air renewal — it is not its domain at all, and that is precisely where the regulations are silent.

A facility manager who installs a heat pump thinking it will solve the air quality of a crowded room is buying the right device for the wrong question.

Occupancy density is a design input, not an anecdote

We published in L'Île-Perrot that a community hall has a human load, and that what is needed then is not fine modulation but a rapidly deployable reserve—the opposite of residential logic. We apply this reasoning; we do not recreate it.

What a childcare setting adds is distinctive and, to our knowledge, has never been written down: the density is high, but it is also predictable to the minute. A home does not know how many people will be in the living room at 3 p.m. A childcare service does: it has a ratio, a schedule, and a list. It is the only category of building where the occupancy load is a document—and a document that does not vary from one week to the next.

Three concrete consequences that we applied here:

1. the occupant load was counted by room, based on the actual number of children in each group, rather than inferred from floor area;
2. the peak is not noon; it is the return from nap time — when an entire group returns to a closed room after an hour of inactivity, the sensible and latent loads rise suddenly;
3. the service window cannot be just any time. Maintenance is scheduled during closure weeks or outside childcare hours, and this is written into the contract rather than negotiated each year.

The occupants of this room cannot describe a malfunction

This is the second half of the problem, and it is what changes how the device is installed.

In a home, the person sitting under the airflow is the person who calls. They say, “There’s a draft on my armchair,” “It has smelled like the basement since Monday,” or “The fan is louder than before.” They are our first diagnostic instrument, and all our user documentation is addressed to them.

Here, the occupants are three years old. They will not report a draft, an odor, or a change in noise. The device must therefore be designed to be monitored by adults who are not in the room permanently and who change.

The airflow and small bodies

At Ange-Gardien, we published a deliberate reversal: in a training room, we keep the active sweep and direct the louvers toward the exercise area, because it is the only room where aiming at people is what we want. A daycare is exactly the opposite case, and this must be stated clearly rather than leaving the impression that the rule is the same everywhere.

Here, we sweep the room and do not aim at anyone—and “anyone” primarily means:

• the nap corner and floor mattresses, where motionless bodies remain for an hour;
• the gathering mat, where the group sits;
• the changing table, if there is one within the field of coverage.

An adult moves when cold. A two-year-old lying on a mattress does not move, and cannot say so. The location of activity areas must therefore be recorded during the technical visit, before purchase, exactly as we record the position of a bed in a child's room—a point that Terrasse-Vaudreuil established and that we apply without rewriting it.

What a three-year-old's hand can reach

This is where section 38.1 of the regulation becomes an installation consideration rather than an administrative formula. Equipment must not constitute a potential danger “having regard to its nature, the place where it is used and the presence of children”. The regulation sets no height for a mechanical device, and we will not invent one.

However, we do point out a value used by the Ministry's Guide: an object placed more than 1.5 metres above the floor is considered out of children's reach. This definition is stated for toxic products and medications, not mechanical devices, and extending it to a heat pump would be an extrapolation. We therefore present it as a useful reference point to discuss with the permit holder, not as a requirement.

What falls within our area of expertise:

• the movable louvers can be bent by hand, and a forced louver does not always return to its original geometry; height is also chosen with children's hands in mind, not only for air distribution and intake clearance;
• the front panel can be unclipped, and a filter removed out of curiosity is a filter that no longer protects the coil;
• nothing is hung from the unit, and no occasional piece of furniture becomes a stepstool beneath it;
• the remote control is not a toy. We documented this in Terrasse-Vaudreuil for a child's bedroom, and the problem is even worse here, with a nuance specific to childcare settings: it is not only the child who moves the measurement point; it is also the substitute adult who does not know which setting was locked in during commissioning. The remote-control cradle is mounted out of reach, and the unlocking procedure is written on the room sheet.

The reserved volume in a room that fills up by itself

A children's room is the champion of gradual clutter: toy bins, low storage furniture, hooks at coat height, crafts hung on the wall. We have published that the reserved volume in front of a head disappears through ordinary accumulation (Saint-David), that clearance disappears through abandonment rather than by decision (Sainte-Hélène-de-Bagot), and that there are spaces where objects do not accumulate but rotate (Noyan). All of this applies, and we will not revisit it.

Only one thing is specific to this room, and it is worth stating: the decorations change with the educational seasons. A hanging mobile, a garland, a large cardboard flower glued to the wall—installed in September, replaced in January, never measured. And paper in a jet has behavior of its own, which we addressed in Saint-Ours by discussing what the jet does to objects in a room.

The answer is not to ban decorations in a daycare, which would be absurd. It is to mark the area during the handover and name it on the room sheet, so the question arises when decorating rather than when something fails.

The paneled wall: what we are actually anchoring into

The wall in this room is made of vertically installed tongue-and-groove pine paneling. This is a common covering in buildings from the 1960s to the 1980s in the area, and it creates an anchoring problem that drywall does not.

We published the core rule in Léry, and it applies to ceilings as well as walls: a plank ceiling is not a support—tongue-and-groove planks are a finish; they carry nothing, and the structure behind them must be established, not assumed. We are not rewriting it. What the wall adds is an extra level of difficulty:

• paneling is a decorative skin installed over an unknown assembly. Behind it, there may be horizontal furring strips with a void, original drywall, old plaster, or nothing at all. A stud finder detects a mass, not its nature.
• the mounting plate is a rigid rectangle that must reach actual structure through the thickness of the paneling and everything in between. A screw that “holds” in a 12 mm pine board holds in a board, not in a wall.
• solid wood moves with the seasons. Paneling expands and contracts, and a plank does not have the same dimensional stability as a panel. The plate must be fastened to the structure, never tightened against the finish alone.
• the pull of the refrigeration lines adds to the weight. This is not just a hanging unit; it is a unit connected to rigid pipes that exert a constant load at the attachment point.

Our practice here can be summed up in one sentence: we characterize the assembly before drilling, we fasten into the identified structure, and if it cannot be reached at the right location, we add a nailing base rather than moving the problem into the paneling.

What is documented, and for whom

Lastly, and this is what truly distinguishes a daycare from a residence: the person who attended the commissioning will not necessarily be there in two years.

We therefore provided, in addition to the usual documentation:

• one sheet per room, displayed in the room rather than filed in a binder — the location of the clear zone, the filter procedure, the locked setting and the reason for it;
• the maintenance schedule written into the contract, rather than offered three years later: in a space with a high textile density, filters load up faster than in a residence, a principle that Terrasse-Vaudreuil established for a child's room and that applies even more here;
• the name of a designated person in charge, because equipment whose maintenance is everyone's responsibility belongs to no one;
• the agreed service window, outside supervision hours.

The selected unit: GREE FreeMatch R32, outdoor unit GWHD(36)ND6MO

Technical data sheet for the installed unit

Two identical 12,000 BTU/h wall-mounted units, one per group room. Total installed capacity: 24,000 BTU/h, or 67% of nominal capacity.

A large compressor for small heads: the argument is occupancy

This intentional undersizing is important, and its justification is not the one usually found in the literature.

1. There is no simultaneity discount here, and it is not a probability—it is a schedule. In a home, we rely on the fact that not all rooms call at the same time; that is what makes it possible to choose a compressor smaller than the sum of the heads. In a childcare setting, both rooms are occupied during the same hours, by design. At Vaudreuil-sur-le-Lac, we described the case of two comparable zones as the worst-case diversity scenario; here, it is no longer an adverse case—it is the definition of the building.

We therefore chose the compressor so that both heads could call for their maximum output at the same time, every day, without the appliance having to arbitrate. At 67%, it will never have to arbitrate. This is the opposite of a cost-saving measure: it is deliberately purchased headroom because simultaneity is guaranteed rather than unlikely.

2. An appliance that cycles in a children's room is a different matter. This model's modulation floor is 8,870 BTU/h; a 12,000 BTU/h head calling on its own is approximately 35% above that, giving it a genuinely wide low-end modulation range. Elsewhere, short cycling costs comfort. Here, it produces an appliance that starts and stops all day in a room where children sleep for an hour in the afternoon.

3. Identical capacities are an operational choice, not an aesthetic one. Two identical heads mean a single filter reference, one procedure to teach, and one spare part to keep on hand. In a residence, this argument is a convenience. In a setting where staff turnover is high and several different people will open the panel over the years, it genuinely reduces the risk of error. We had published the opposite case at Bois-des-Filion, where two heads with different capacities required two separate references to be entered in the file; it is the same reasoning, applied in reverse.

Finally, note a constraint imposed by the regulations themselves that affects the calculation: the play area must have windows opening to the outside representing at least 10% of the floor area. By legal requirement, a daycare room is a highly glazed room—and a highly glazed room has a high solar load. Here, the glazing is not an architect's choice; it is a requirement, and it must be accounted for.

46 metres of developed length, and 120 g of R32 added

The runs measure 24 m and 22 m, for a total of 46 m of developed length—the outdoor unit had to be placed away from play areas and windows. The GWHD(36) is precharged for 40 m; therefore, 6 m × 20 g/m = 120 g had to be added, or approximately 4% of the factory charge, bringing the system to 2,820 g. The maximum total length of 80 m and the 25 m elevation difference leave a comfortable margin.

The added quantity is weighed and recorded in the file, and the minimum-room-area check required for A2L refrigerant was redone using the final charge rather than the catalog charge. By connecting only two heads to a unit that accepts four, two ports remain free—and in a daycare setting, where adding a group room is a foreseeable administrative event rather than a whim, this reserve has practical value.

Beloeil: what you need to know

The city's name comes from an exclamation. The Commission de toponymie du Québec cites Pierre Lambert's research, according to which, in 1693, Jean-Baptiste Hertel is said to have exclaimed “What a beautiful eye” upon seeing the mountain panorama—and dismisses as unlikely the theory that the name was borrowed from the Belgian city of the same name. The seigneury of Beloeil was granted to Joseph Hertel de Saint-François in 1694. The village municipality was created in 1903, and the city in 1914.

There is something fitting about writing an article about a children’s facility in a city named after the idea of seeing well, when the regulation’s first requirement for a play area is a clear window providing an unobstructed view at all times.

Three current reference points:

• 25,318 residents, according to the population decree published in the Gazette officielle du Québec in December 2025, based on estimates from the Institut de la statistique du Québec—making Beloeil one of the most populous cities covered by this series;
• the city occupies the west bank of the Richelieu River, opposite Mount Saint-Hilaire, and is connected to Mont-Saint-Hilaire by the Jordi-Bonet Bridge (Routes 116 and 229) and the Arthur-Branchaud Bridge (Highway 20);
• Route 116, Route 229 and Highway 20 cross the area, which explains the density of services and the ease of access for our teams.

The mistakes we correct most often

• Believe that a regulation that is silent on the maximum allows inaction in July. Silence is not permission.
• Buy a heat pump to solve an air problem. It does not provide ventilation; an air exchanger is needed.
• Calculate the load of a childcare room based on its floor area. Here, the number of occupants is a document; it must be counted.
• Install it at adult height without thinking about little hands.
• Leave the remote control in the room.
• Attach a plate to paneling instead of finding the structure behind it.
• Schedule maintenance without looking at the childcare calendar.
• Hand the documentation to a person rather than an organization.

Grants, warranty and documentation

A childcare facility is not eligible for the same programs as a residence, and this must be verified before ordering rather than afterward. Three administrative rules matter more than any amount of money: the declared AHRI code must correspond to the combination actually installed—the same outdoor model can have three codes depending on the type of indoor units; the model must appear on the list applicable to the program in question; and the installation must be carried out by a company holding the appropriate licences from the Régie du bâtiment du Québec, given the work to be performed. Depending on the building and organization’s status, the programs intended for business and institutional clients are the ones to examine, not residential programs—the verification is done with the program, with the licence number in hand.

Our other projects in the area

Beloeil is the first municipality in the RCM of La Vallée-du-Richelieu where we are publishing a FreeMatch R32 project. In the same city, we already have a page dedicated to a GREE central heat pump with a duct network.

The distinction between the two deserves to be stated, because it is the very subject of this page. The main page answers a building question: how to treat an entire volume. This page answers an occupant question: who is in the room, and who can speak for them. A duct network serves a building where no one ever encounters the unit; a wall-mounted head is installed in a room, above people who did not choose it and who, in this case, cannot describe how it behaves. The building has a system; the room has occupants.

Our teams serve the entire South Shore, Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, the North Shore, and Montérégie, including Mont-Saint-Hilaire, McMasterville, Otterburn Park, Saint-Basile-le-Grand, and Saint-Mathieu-de-Beloeil.

What we take away from this project

Quebec regulations protect young children from the cold, with a precise and verifiable threshold, but say nothing about heat. No safe indoor temperature threshold has been established in Quebec, schools have CO₂ targets that daycare services do not, and a ductless heat pump—regardless of its quality—does not renew the air in a room.

Between these three facts, a management decision remains, and it deserves a quote that tells the truth about what the unit does and what it will not do.

For a ductless heat pump, ductless air conditioner, or HVAC maintenance project in a daycare, school, clinic, or any other space occupied by people who are not the client, in Beloeil, the RCM of La Vallée-du-Richelieu, or elsewhere in Montérégie, our teams travel to the site, count occupants room by room, identify activity areas before choosing the wall, and provide documentation designed to remain useful even after staff changes.