I’m very happy others are documenting their heat pump installs.
It confirms three things for me.
1. Contractor quality is the biggest pain for the adoption of residential green tech.
2. Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense. Japan does this.
3. DIY is has the hidden benefit of speed/quality/cost, since contractor pain is high. Yes, I understand the massive opportunity costs.
A friend of mine is trying to install a new central heat pump in their home. The only thing stopping them is contractors being hard to work with. Not price.
I also DIY a lot of things like this and find it really ironic how the DIY YouTubers I learn from are constantly better than a majority of professionals, especially given the insane costs they charge (I often see 3-4x equipment cost in my area).
The main reason I diy most of my home and car repairs is that 90% of the contractors and mechanics I have used over the years have been shockingly incompetent. Their communication skills are crap, they cut corners at every opportunity, sometimes straight up lie, and treat every customer like an idiot.
There is huge gap in the market for tradespeople who take their work even semi-seriously.
Same. But I don’t do much on my cars. My strategy has been to just only buy Japanese cars (Honda and Toyota for me) and keep them for about 10 years or 150k miles. I’ve never needed do so anything besides replace a dead battery, fluids, filters, tires, and other basic maintenance which I let the lube shop and tire shop do. Basically the recommended 30/60/90/etc. I could do cheaper but it’s not worth the hassle for me given they can do it quickly.
I’ve bought new 3 times now with this strategy and while I could buy used and save some money or drive them longer, I view this as the cost of avoiding major maintenance.
Anytime I’ve owned a German or American made vehicle the chance of something failing is too high for me. The entire experience of having a vehicle out of commission is a huge hassle I want to avoid altogether.
Against better judgement, I do also own a Tahoe that I bought used just for doing “work”. Towing and doing dirty stuff, Home Depot runs, etc. It’s basically a tool for the DIY stuff I enjoy doing (house construction/work). It’s caused me the most grief, but still not too bad, belts and radiators and alternators, stuff I’ve diy’d because it’s easy but still stuff I’ve never had issues with on Japanese cars.
I only use a shop when it’s going to take a LOT of time.
I’ve opened up my hood a few too many times to find a cap or extra bolts tucked in between the side of the hood and the weatherstrip.
Are duplicates from the new part? Did they assemble it and find they had extra fasteners (I know I have)?
Did they puncture my seat while they were in the car and then gaslight me?
I could go raise hell, but it’s difficult to prove these things and the mechanics I trusted have moved on to better careers in HVAC or elsewhere, so I just put on a podcast and do most of the work myself. It’s not so bad.
Part of the problem is the pay for many tradesmen doesn't go up much for doing better work with more skills and knowledge, the only incentive most of the workers get is to just do it faster. You don't often get a bonus by making beautiful piece of work, you will get a bonus for getting done quicker even if it is the barest minimum quality of work. And many people who would make excellent craftsman are also smart and skilled enough to enter many other fields that pay better and have far less workplace hazards and doesn't involve them having to regularly pump out trash work to stay competitive.
DIY YouTubers read books, experiment, learn from others, and do extra-research. Most of the trades people are not doing any of that stuff. Almost all residential trades are poorly trained: many go to some trade school, get a job at a local contractor who doesn't want to further train. Unions are good at training; however, they want people to spend four years as an apprentice.
the DIY youtubers also know they will get a thorough drubbing in the comment section and may even lose subscribers if they do it to a poor level. the incentives for shortcuts on a job site by a worker are to get the job done(good enough for a layperson) and leave.
That’s kind of the problem, you don’t need to learn much at all/anything to do this right now. Because the bosses of the world aren’t enforcing any standards in terms of craftsmanship or quality of work. They pretty much just show up to see how much of a mess has been made and how quickly they can patch it up in order to ask for final payment or whatever is needed for completion
DIY also often has the benefit of being the only option when bureaucratic hurdles are in the way. Sometimes, approvals (from the government or from the landlord) are required, which can be hard, onerous, impossible or time-consuming to get.
Ignoring those requirements is often the most practical way with very limited negative consequences.
It also allows using much cheaper units - from what I've heard in Germany the unit (without the install cost!) will cost 2x as much when installed through an official installer compared to a high quality free-market option, but of course the installer will only install units sold through them so many people may be priced out of the legal route completely.
in bay area, install costs for $2k unit are $6k-$8k (took multiple quotes. 3 years ago). very simple install in garage through the wall. "hardest" part was adding 240v disconnect (electrician did it for $300 or so).
You don’t get the “full warranty” when you DIY hvac installs. You also need to call a licensed hvac tech to charge your system if it doesn’t come precharged. Mini splits are easy and I would 1000% DIY. Big, attic mount blower units I would leave to the pros for so many reasons. That said my cousin installed a 21 SEER unit for $5k. I was quoted $35k for the same system (:
I haven't personally had need to do it (yet), but I know multiple people who got the EPA certification to be able to service their own equipment. It can be obtained by taking an online test.
given installation price vs system price, it's possible to trash old one and buy a new few times for a price of professional install.
mrcool also has ducted units that comes with precharged/vacuumed lines. very tempting as one of my hvacs lives on extended timeline and quote for a new one was $25k 2 years ago
> Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense.
This doesn’t get shouted nearly enough. >90% of New England housing stock older than 30 years is not remotely worth the price they’re commanding. They’re either dumpster fires of knob-tube wiring and sagging floors, or contractor “spray foam specials” that make deliberate errors like the OP’s post points out. Yet because zoning laws are strongly tilted in favor of existing owners (and who are predominantly NIMBYs), it makes teardowns a costly affair on their own - and getting approval to build a new structure can take years, if at all.
Housing shouldn’t be disposable, but it should be readily replaceable with modern techniques and efficiency gains, provided it’s up to local code.
I agree with you in principle, but 30 years is probably the wrong number. I have a house in coastal Maine, built in 1997. It's coming up on 30 years. I assure you, it's vastly different than the my first house (1941) or my last (1953), in good ways.
But to your point, we consider way too much to be "historic" and I'd like for that to change. You really should be able to tear down almost anything you'd like and rebuild as long as it's to code/zoning, and zoning needs to be cut back to things like dimensions and use, not appearance. Being old shouldn't make something eligible for historic preservation on its own.
Code should be about fire safety for the fire department if it burns. if you can't build on the lot then it needs to be because of something there - or if they are planning to build it (a new utility) then they need to rebuy the easement every 10 years until they do. Height is limited only by airport flight lines.
everything else is none of your business. (Okay, I might have missed something but it is on those lines)
Height (number of units, really) is limited mainly by the bandwidth of the roads, water mains, and sewers in the area. These are things that are expensive, very expensive to expand. Of course in practice height is firstly limited by zoning to protect existing properties' owners, but you can't ignore the infrastructure needed for larger buildings.
In the United States something simply being old in no way makes it historic in any legal sense (e.g., contributing to a local historic district): integrity[1] matters if you are trying to legally deem a resource historic and worthy of some sort of preservation effort. Generally speaking buildings, structures, or objects need to be at least 50 years old, integrity aside (but there are exceptions if they are particularly noteworthy).
I tend to disagree with the need to tear stuff down just because it's old: it's so terribly wasteful. We need to get better at adapting, reusing, and adding on to older buildings. Granted, when developers just want to use the cheapest materials possible and build something that will start to have serious problems in 20 years, it's a problem, to say nothing of the loss of serious knowledge in various skilled trades.
[1] In most cases the National Register of Historic Places aspects of integrity are used for evaluation: integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.
The price you're paying is mostly for the land, not the house. Land is valuable because it's guaranteed to remain hoardable, closer to gold - it's something you can buy and just ignore while the price goes up.
I'm in the same boat. No knob and tune, and all the plaster has been removed as well (thankfully by someone else in the houses lifetime).
I've also DIY installed 3 mini split units in the house -- the last one being an AC / DC unit that directly gets powered via 4 panels on the roof during the sunny moments of the day.
Built a new addition 3-4 years back. It's far better insulated than the main structure, but the wood stove and heat pump combo keeps winter mostly at bay.
It was already answered, but conventional AC systems have resistive heating elements which have a a max efficiency of 100 percent.
Heat pumps run an AC in reverse which can give a COP of 3-4. (300 to 400 percent efficiency)
or if actually burning fuel for heat. Could just remove the need for direct fuel burning altogether.
Highly dependent on area, and associated costs. I recommend that you run the numbers for your area
A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse. In the winter, it provides heat; summer, it provides cooling.
It's greener because it's not burning fossil fuels (directly, anyway) vs. a propane / natural gas furnace, and it's more efficient than resistive heating.
> A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse
Is this really the correct terminology? I'd say every AC is a heat pump, whether or not it can run in reverse, because that's how it works. It pumps heat from a colder place to a warmer place.
If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
According to the HVAC industry it is the correct term, based on my experience.
I agree with your logic both modes of operation (heat/cool) are both pumping heat.
Cripple is a fairly strong word here. HVAC is hyper optimized for cost/simplicity at the expense of comfort and efficiency. Which kills me. The industry is also stuck in the 80s in terms of power electronics. Variable speed control on the fans and compressors are a BIG deal. Like 20k for the gear. Even though the BOM cost is dirt cheap. Look at Carrier Infinity if you are curious
MANY Megawatts worth of power would be saved if they just included a directional valve, some speed control PCB and electronic expansion valve
Until recently, they've not been as common here in the US. Fossil fuels are just so much cheaper for the end customer, and central HVAC units in homes are much more common here.
> If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
Yes, it pumps heat, but it's generally not referred to as a heat pump if it doesn't have a reversing valve and all the accoutrements that go with it (coil defrost heater, etc). I wouldn't say not having all those parts make it crippled, a refrigerator/freezer isn't crippled because it can't heat food, although some commercial units can be set to keep cold food cold or hot food hot because they have reversing valves.
If you have utility natural gas at reasonable prices, gas fired heat can be very economical, and it might not be forseable that you would ever use electricity for heating, in which case a reversing valve is a waste of capital.
The words "air conditioner" don't literally mean much at all. It doesn't refer to a humidifier or a hepa filter for instance, yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize.
I view "heat pump" as a technical term describing how some heaters/coolers/dehumidifiers/clothes driers/fridges work. Wikipedia seems to somewhat agree with me, although article about heat pumps seems focused on space heaters and coolers.
> yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize
Well, yes, in US it apparently means "heat pump based space cooler". Where I live it means "heat pump based space heater and cooler".
Its more complex to have a reversible heat pump, because in addition to the reversing valve, you also need two metering devices and a bypass for each of them.
Often "heat pump" refers to a reversible AC, which is not every AC, so they're not synonymous. In places where it's always too hot, or always too cold, no need to bother with the reversing option, just install it the way it'll always be used. In places that are typically an alright temperature, which means they're sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold, you want it reversible.
Great question. The unit is pre charged for 25 feet of lineset . I was right at the limit for my install.
I installed the lines, did all the vacuum related work. Then just cracked the valve on the unit to distribute the refrigerant.
I had a bottle of refrigerant on standby from a buddy. Didn’t need to use it . I was going to get the EPA cert, if my buddy didn’t exist. I heard it’s super straightforward
The vacuum work, finding/fixing leaks, etc can be a real nightmare, even with the expensive equipment. Personally I would much rather pay an HVAC technician to just come and pull the vacuum. They already have the gear, and they can diagnose when your vacuum still doesn't pull all the way for the 3rd time. Then if you don't get a precharged unit, they can also fill it.
that is IF the technician cares enough... unless you guys have stringent regulatory/right incentives in place. sometimes tech just relies on the brand reputation and pull for 10mins calls it a day
Yes. I might be missing something obvious. Are we talking about the my link drive website? If so, yes. I clicked the link from my website and it took me straight to the website with no issue.
https://dnschecker.org/#A/mylinkdrive.com gives similar results - resolves fine in North America (US/Canada/Mexico) and a few other counties (Brazil/Ireland/Russia/China, and one of the two Australia sites), but fails elsewhere (including in Singapore).
I replaced my central air heat pump myself last spring. Outside unit and inside air exchange.
The inside unit happened to fit pretty well with a little adjustment in the place the old one (from the 1980s) had been, and I made my own connections to the ductwork. I placed the 2 ton outside unit on the pad where the old one had been. I did have an AC company come and remove the Freon from the old unit, then I cut it up and took it to the scrap yard.
I was able to do this with no vacuuming lines as they sell precharged kits with lines similar to mini splits. It's been over a year and it worked like a charm through summer and winter. It took about 5 days or a week including removing the old unit, pulling the lines under the house, setting the inside and outside units and buttoning everything up. The reason it even took a week was a I did it entirely myself including moving the units with roller logs.
I saved over $6,000 from what I was quoted from an HVAC company which I felt was entirely worth a week of manual labor.
The OP spent $42,000 (with somehow over a month of work) to install a mini split and then $1000/mo to run it some months just because they couldn’t bother to find the massive leaks in their apartment? Am I on drugs?
There's a related post from the same blog about using Bitcoin mining for space heating. Whatever one may think about Bitcoin, I kinda get the impression that practicality isn't at all high on the author's list.
> Still when I ask Claude.AI to double-check the math on our power consumption, it thinks we have an incredibly leaky apartment. Like ridiculously off the charts. This also lines up with my inability to run a humidifier in the winter. I got the biggest, baddest humidifier I could find, and it barely makes a difference.
I would have started figuring this out before spending any money on a mini-split. OP, your climate envelope has failed somewhere. Spend some more money on a IR camera and try and identify where that leak is. Your basically just air-conditioning some of your apartment and some of the outdoors.
This is a good idea, and they can check for additional issues with the electrical. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their meter was hooked up to multiple units or common spaces. The electric company had mixed up every single meter in my old condo build for 15 years.
They don’t say what the kWh usage is, just that the electricity cost in $$ is over $1000 on the highest month. For a unit surrounded by what should be other conditioned spaces, that’s insane to me.
A quick web search indicates that nyc $/kwh is about 31c. So that’s 3225kwh in one month! My standalone house plus pool pump, dual zone ac, and ev charger doesn’t even come close. Clearly there is a major insulation issue which is the root cause and everything else is just trying to put bandaids on an arterial bleed.
> We do have bad aluminum-framed windows, and we also have no insulation in our ceiling, so maybe all the heat goes to our upstairs neighbors. I also have various fans sucking air out of the apartment non-stop, one in each bathroom and one from the clothes dryer (when I hold an incense stick up to it I can see it pulling in air even when it’s not running), plus I have an elevator that opens into the apartment which might have a chimney effect.
They not only have zero insulation, they have negative insulation. They would have saved more money/energy by simply stopping all the heat/cold loss. And (at least in my state) they'd still get rebates for installing new insulation.
There is something seriously wrong with this person’s apartment.
I have a three bed circa 1897 coop in Brooklyn. We have the leakiest windows this side of the Mississippi with multiple in-window air conditioners and my bill never goes above $450 in the summer (that’s probably about 250-300 in comparable usage for the middle of the country).
Yeah, we live far north of NYC where it gets much colder, and have never spent nearly that much on heating. Even when we lived in a converted barn from the 1930s with single pane windows and no wall insulation, the most we ever spent was about $500/month. Now (new construction, triple-pane windows, ground-sourced heat pump) it’s more like $80/month
If they're paying $1000/month at 30c/kWh, they could quite nearly run the latest over-the-counter bitcoin miner 24/7 with that amount of electricity usage.
Freaking expensive! And with bad service? Wow. I live in the northeast of Brazil, 27–32 °C all year, every day. When I installed a heat pump for our bedroom, it cost me about $500 for a Midea unit, $50 to prepare an electrical outlet, and $100 for installation, which was done in a single day. Service here isn’t great, but I guess it’s five stars compared to New York’s
My electricity cost to run this unit every night is ~$55 extra
I live in India. The summers can be 40C. So $500 for an extremely energy efficient split-ac from a local manufacturer that does up to 12K BTU/h and $50 for installation.
I ran it 16h every day at 40% capacity for 2-3 months with the rotary inverter compressor pulling about 250-300W when cooling for a total power consumption of about 180 kWh per month.
Here in Australia it takes barely a day to install a couple of split ACs and maybe 1-2000 USD all-in (Mitsubishi Electric; Midea would be cheaper of course).
No idea how they justify the time and cost over there.
Then again they pay tens of thousands of dollars to install solar when it's 1/10th of the price here.
I had this done recently, also in a Brooklyn apartment, and this article made me appreciate that my contractor was insanely good. The main reason I didn’t DIY it was because I thought it would be hard to get the condo board to agree to it, but after watching them do the work I realized there was no way I could have done it myself. Not really because of the HVAC part, but because of the cutting through exterior walls and snaking the line through the walls. It took about 2 days, the quality of the work was very good, and they even worked around my kid’s nap schedule. They have also been very prompt when I’ve needed service calls since then. Overall it was a huge amount of money well spent.
I love heat pumps, but the author should have had an energy audit done first. Likely a thermal camera on a cold day would quickly identify their envelope issues.
> one from the clothes dryer (when I hold an incense stick up to it I can see it pulling in air even when it’s not running)
A normal vented clothes dryer can vent something like 8000 cu ft of air in a normal drying cycle (i.e. all of the air in their apartment). If that's running all the time somehow, that could definitely explain a lot. If that's the case they should fix it, and maybe explore ventless heatpump dryers.
Doesn't need to be a heatpump dryer, just needs to be ventless.
E.g. the 20+ year old common German dryer that runs the clothes air closed-loop, first through the clothes, then to a heat exchanger with drainage geometry (typically feeding into a tray you have to pull out and pour out after each cycle), then across an electric heater, circulation fan, and back to the clothes.
A second fan blows room air across the heat exchanger; the dryer action relies on the clothes being much warmer than room temperature such that the desired relative humidity of/at the clothes doesn't survive the cold from the room temperature.
Yeah, modern heat pump dryers are just nice and have cycle times more in line with North American expectations, but you’re right that alternatives have been around a long time!
Spending 42k instead of adding some $2/free improvised shims to fix the AC angle to drip outside sure is a life decision. Especially when you learn where this is (I won't dox the author). BKUSA baby! We attract the smartest hippest people.
The article did mention there are other benefits, noise, improved temperature hysteresis, the ability to actually provide sufficient heat during the cold months.
Ever spend time in a hotel room with a noisy, rattly AC that turned on and off all the time because it couldn't maintain the temperatures at the set point? Hard to get decent sleep.
Yeah I agree. I accidentally walked out my front door without my keys in my pocket for the first time in my life. I called my property management company who sent over a technician to unlock the door. The management company intentionally does such a poor job that there is no spare key to my apartment. So the technician has to drill the lock. Surprise! The technician only claims they have a lock-drilling skill.
My phone dies and the technician says I have to call a locksmith and pay for it myself. Now I’m in small claims court for $1275 no good reason other than my property management company enabling extortion by a locksmith. All they had to do was hire or train someone into being competent lock driller.
Real estate industry in this city is a toxic grift game. People are very nice here, but these real estate people are the “assholes” in which everyone refers. The whole thing is rotten except for maybe 5% of landlords.
Because he’s not a locksmith, he is a contracted technician that performs duties in the illegal absence of a building super. There are more details to my case that will just make your jaw drop more but I chose to keep focused on the fundamentals. And yes if I owned the apartment I would not want property management having a key. However I include that detail to indicate how poorly managed my building is without listing off 10 other things.
Locksmiths won't do that in general - even if they know how. Picking makes it look easy - not only can they not justify their bill but also people ask if locks provide any security and that is bad for business.
I watched a locksmith pick someone's apartment door in 10 seconds and then charge them $80. Then everyone commented on how easy it looked and the locksmith was very friendly about it.
I have yet to see the first emergency locksmith that isn't a grifter. The moment you can't open a lock yourself, you're paying ten times the reasonable rate, or worse.
It's usually cheaper to knock in a window, or if you live in an expensive area, to buy a fire axe and break down the door.
The trick is to to find real locksmiths, with a real storefront, preferably ahead of time. If you just Google emergency locksmith and your ZIP code or location, all of the top results will be scammers in unmarked vans. This is an old scam, it's got its own Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam
"but it also meant that our ground-floor neighbors don’t have a window blocked that’s under the stairs."
That's a thing you could have done, cover their window with your AC unit?
It seems like something that planning regulations should prevent.
And still, they have a loud compressor right next to their window.
the HVAC industry in the US is absolute highway robbery, I was quoted $10k to install a $1k mini split that took a total novice (me) a weekend to install - the most difficult part of the process was figuring out the best place to route the copper lines (because you have to be careful not to pinch them around a corner)
a friend paid a similar company the same and the work looks like total garbage, they're didn't even properly set the pad to place the outdoor unit on - and the techs are absolutely clueless about how the systems work
> Still when I ask Claude.AI to double-check the math on our power consumption, it thinks we have an incredibly leaky apartment. Like ridiculously off the charts.
Ah. That answers my question about how you ventilate the apartment for fresh air: it's thoroughly perforated.
I just did an 18K BTU mini split in my garage myself with no HVAC background for around $1K and $300 in tools. For a little more capacity this guy paid 30-40x the price.
This article is a perfect example of why I moved out of NYC. Contractors there are more likely to be dishonest, less skilled and more expensive and have insane leverage over rich apartment dwellers who might own a screwdriver but basically have no ability (or permission) to do anything themselves.
Smart, productive people thus have large parts of their lives eaten up dealing with things that are trivial in a large majority of the country because of the density. I decided I’d rather spend my time pursuing my own goals not basic daily comfort.
If all of the trades were there on the same day and each could begin their work immediately after the prior specialist had finished it might have taken a day or a few, but it sounds like much of that month was simply waiting. If you're handy and in a part of the world where you can just do all of this work yourself at your own pace its no surprise you can be much faster.
NYC is a famously difficult place to have work like this done, especially in a shared-ownership building like a condo. You need your neighbors to agree its okay to do, your board/management company needs to review and be satisfied with the insurance your contractors carry, the city has requirements for electrical that always require permits and often require a master electrician to do the work, and even once the work starts the walls and spaces you're working in aren't exclusively yours and your contractors will be discovering things along the way... plumbing for that spigot you didn't know your neighbor had on their terrace, roof drains, etc.
The process of just getting approval to do work can vary from "chill but time consuming" in small buildings to "impenetrable bureaucracy so don't bother if you're not using the approved vendors" in large co-ops. Once it starts, that master electrician you hired to run the 220v service isn't gonna waste his time repairing drywall, a cheaper subcontractor will do that, and the latency just cranks up from there
I love city living and understand that most of these rules and regulations exist because bad things happened when they didn't - frankly I wouldn't trust most of my neighbors in buildings I've lived in to do their own electrical work or pierce the building's envelope for any reason - but also sort of understand where the outsider's perception that city homeowner life is hard and expensive comes from. It very often is, by comparison.
There is a way around this, but it is board driven: a group buy is arranged and the entire building is done at once. The board or a GC they hire subs out the work and coordinates order of operations, and uses known good contractors from references. It’s for sure a coordination challenge, but it can be done if the will is there and residents are friendly to collaboration. Otherwise, it’s just pain (having coordinated electrification refits for ~50 unit buildings).
About $10,000 per unit (including the PTAC removal/wall repair), sheesh. A new mini split in my St Louis (city) house was $5.5k, and that was one rung up from lowball $4k contractor.
Also, instead of the OEM wifi module, i had success with a sensibo, which has temp/hum/CO2/TVOC sensor, HomeKit control, and an IR blaster. I took that route when I learned the wifi module was locked down to their app, with no HomeKit.
> How much money did we save? Not as much as expected. The most expensive month in the next winter was $1000.
$1,000/month to heat a 3br apartment? Holy crap is he keeping it at sauna temperatures? The most I've ever spent on my poorly-insulated 1960's era bilevel house is about $250.
If your bedrooms are upstairs, at night you might be running heat a lot less since some of the heat from the first floor rises up to the second. If you have carpet, that can create a warmer area at the floor, closer to where your beds are. So you might not need to heat things as much, or to as high a temperature to feel comfortable.
I lived in an apartment where the floor was poorly insulated. When a new neighbor moved in downstairs that heated their bedroom more aggressively at night, my heating bill went down because the heat rising from below made it less necessary to run my own heating as hard.
It might also be the difference in electricity cost. Especially with tiered rates, you can easily find yourself moving into a higher tier where every kW is significantly more expensive than in the previous tiers. PG&E in the SF Bay Area charges between 43 and 60c/kWh. A 2kW heater is going to cost about $1/hr to run , so if you're working from home, have little kids it gets expensive quick. And in the middle of a NY winter, with a poorly isolated apartment, you might well be running the heat in some capacity pretty much 24/7.
Con Ed rates are about 0.16/kWh so in their case it's not the cost of electricity, it's all the things explained after the $1000/month line, a ridiculous lack of insulation and lack of air-tightness.
They may also keep the heat higher than most people. There's mention of an au pair so there must be a small child.
I'm with you on this. That cost seems excessive. Mind you, they should including be quoting kwh usage as price varies by region. And they should be talking about the temperature differential they are maintaining.
Thanks for taking the time to do such a thorough writeup on this - it's fascinating to compare with the install we did a couple of months ago on our house in the UK.
We already installed a Daikin Altherma 3 air-to-water heat pump three years ago, which heats around a thousand meters of underfloor pipework + domestic hot water cylinder, but recently added a Daikin air-to-air heat pump. This is relatively new to the UK, at least in homes, so there aren't many contractors in the market yet.
Making good afterwards is certainly the challenge - I'm still repairing the plasterboard (drywall) holes, which I needed to make for access into the eaves. (I preferred this to having lots of external plastic trunking.)
I'm looking forward to seeing how the air-to-air heat pump helps with our winter humidity.
This makes me feel a lot better about having just laid down $5,000 on 6 units with installation included...
And $1,000 for the Wi-Fi module? I was looking at the part when comparing the cheaper and more expensive units (which either don't or do come with it from the factory), it's $60 to buy separately.
I control my Mitsubishi mini-splits with an esp32. I’d never done any soldering or worked with a microcontroller before, but I was able to install this into 4 units in a single day.
This esphome project has great integration with home-assistant and Apple Home and I’d highly recommend this approach over the Mitsubishi app if your unit is supported and you’re willing to do a little work.
Packaged Terminal Air Conditioners (PTAC) are self-contained heating and cooling systems designed to be installed through a wall, commonly used in hotels and apartments.
I don’t think the previous system was using space heaters though, the PTAC they had before presumably had a heat pump in it if it was generating condensation.
Not directly relevant, but my PTAC in NYC started having issues this summer just as things got hot (of course).
The compressor would come on for a few seconds then shut off.
After 2 different HVAC companies quoted me $275 to come out (plus hourly and the repair once they find the issue) and then also told me it would be 10 days before they had availability I finally bit the bullet, bought a $30 multimeter, watched a few videos on how capacitor failure is super common and how to hopefully not kill myself, and after confirming with the multimeter and buying the $7 capacitor everything was right back to working with 2 minutes of work.
I did have a moment where I dreaded thinking I'd need to replace the unit and if so whether I'd want a split put in but for $53K I'd better get a third job... Quite glad not to have had to get too far down this road.
I had something similar happen, but for a gas boiler (hot water radiators). Our was older, but not super old. It would intermittently turn off and we couldn’t figure it out. HVAC Contractor (who we had a maintenance contract with) thought the system was toast and needed a replacement. I noticed a bad capacitor (was blown). HVAC contractor claimed they couldn’t find one through their suppliers. I had two delivered five days later.
When they came back to check the system for a full quote, the tech felt so bad that they just installed the new capacitor for free and we got another few years out of that boiler.
HVAC must be one of the most dishonest professions in the US. I’m not in NYC but received similar quotes($15-20k to do a few rooms).
Obviously having family in South America where there are millions of these installed by unskilled labor I decided to DIY. So I installed 2 units with 2 heads each, including pouring the concrete pads, vacuuming the line sets, and charging them. Took me two weekends and about $4000 in materials including the units themselves. It’s been two years, none of the BS fear mongering issues have happened, and they have almost paid for themselves.
Private equity has been buying out HVAC companies in the US. The technician are forced to drive up sales. So instead of repairing something, they now recommend new equipment. I saw this difference in behavior at an HVAC company I used for a 10 years. The owners were retiring and the private equity bought them out. You really have to go by word of mouth and seek out the smaller companies.
Similar thing happened for Veterinary care clinics.
There is a very different pattern I learned to recognize with Private Equity electricians. Its not all negative- they have fast availability and good communication (because they have office staff), but that’s the end of the good stuff.
You call for one broken outlet and they pull out fancy branded folders and pens with checklists of every little thing that could possibly be upgraded (inplying its needed for safety) present you with a multi $K bill and then do a little magic 10% discount for some reason to make you think its a good deal.
That said I get my petty revenge by asking questions at the free consult (marketing opportunity) then hiring local guys instead, whenever I cam find them.
RAM Air in San Marcos, south of Austin. Ask for Edgar. He's self trained and likes to rebuild boards from scratch. He'll service out to west Austin if the job is big enough. He mostly trains techs. So, if you ask, he'll happily walk you through a repair in the phone. (Most jobs are only 20–40m.) He makes his money on the big jobs with repeat customers. When he retires ... fuck me.
Many HVAC technicians are not good at service calls (troubleshoot and fix); they are sales people in disguise. I also heard many local HVAC/plumbing companies are owned by private equity of sorts.
The electrical is relatively easy. It's not much harder than replacing a frayed power cord on a lamp (with an extra wire if the unit is 220 rather than 110).
Managing the lineset is the scary part (though it's not that hard). You're vacuuming copper lines that you've hopefully sealed correctly. If you get that wrong and your refrigerant yeets off into the sky, you have to call in help because it's hard for an unlicensed person to get the refrigerant legally. That half-hour of work and ~$1 of materials will cost you a punitive amount of money.
It’s really easy, 220v is not that hard to install and is the scam scam run by people installing ev chargers.
You do have to go through the permitting process which means having someone come out to view it and write off on it and if you state it properly it should be less than $200.
Electrical is both surprisingly easy and surprisingly hard.
The actual work involved is relatively easy and straightforward. However, the code and regulations are extremely difficult to navigate. There’s a lot of non-obvious things you have to do to be code-compliant.
Some understanding of electrical circuits, split phase motors, and control circuits (using step down transformers, relays, contactors) is extremely helpful. HVAC systems contains at least two motors--blower motor inside and compressor motor outside. And control circuits are activated by a thermostat.
I have rented for a few decades, primarily from older owners' crappier 2nd-homes, typically the last remants of older housing in gentrifying parts of working-class towns. My ideal landlord doesn't want to invest anything in their rental, other than bare-minimums for legal habitability [even then..].
This has four-times given me immense negotiating leverage, with the trade-off of having to provide my own labor for minimal standards of living (e.g. I currently pay ~40% below-market, but am responsible for all HVAC/mech/pest maintenance; example: recently replaced the water heater).
Have you asked your landlord if you can modify your apartment, or is it a corporate no-returned-calls situation?
This makes me happy my house has ductwork and HVAC plumbing from the attic to outdoors. I don’t have an AC yet but it seems like it’ll be easier than this.
seems outrageous to me. money would've been better spent removing all dry wall and existing insulation, spraying in closed spray foam, putting up the sheetrock and repainting, and then buying a single portable inverter air condition unit.
On a similar note, I have some Daikin AC units, expensive ones and of course they didn’t come with wifi module which Daikin prices at 100+ Euro per module. After some searching around I found the Faikin [1] project and got one module to test for around 30 Euro and it works brilliantly for 1/3 of the price and provides even more functionality from what I’ve read with seamless HA integration.
If you just want to be able to control the ACs remotely, without remote sensing, you can buy some cheap IoT IR blasters (around $15–30 for Zigbee or WiFi versions). They'll often have control schemes you can download for your specific equipment (cloning the IR remote control that came with the AC).
I’m very happy others are documenting their heat pump installs.
It confirms three things for me.
1. Contractor quality is the biggest pain for the adoption of residential green tech.
2. Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense. Japan does this.
3. DIY is has the hidden benefit of speed/quality/cost, since contractor pain is high. Yes, I understand the massive opportunity costs.
A friend of mine is trying to install a new central heat pump in their home. The only thing stopping them is contractors being hard to work with. Not price.
Here’s my DIY install.
https://www.ratchetwerks.com/heat-pump-mini-split-install
I also DIY a lot of things like this and find it really ironic how the DIY YouTubers I learn from are constantly better than a majority of professionals, especially given the insane costs they charge (I often see 3-4x equipment cost in my area).
The main reason I diy most of my home and car repairs is that 90% of the contractors and mechanics I have used over the years have been shockingly incompetent. Their communication skills are crap, they cut corners at every opportunity, sometimes straight up lie, and treat every customer like an idiot.
There is huge gap in the market for tradespeople who take their work even semi-seriously.
I also DIY my car repairs, and not because I like cars.
I just hate, hate, cannot stand paying skilled craftsman hourly rates for rushed sloppy work.
Same. But I don’t do much on my cars. My strategy has been to just only buy Japanese cars (Honda and Toyota for me) and keep them for about 10 years or 150k miles. I’ve never needed do so anything besides replace a dead battery, fluids, filters, tires, and other basic maintenance which I let the lube shop and tire shop do. Basically the recommended 30/60/90/etc. I could do cheaper but it’s not worth the hassle for me given they can do it quickly.
I’ve bought new 3 times now with this strategy and while I could buy used and save some money or drive them longer, I view this as the cost of avoiding major maintenance.
Anytime I’ve owned a German or American made vehicle the chance of something failing is too high for me. The entire experience of having a vehicle out of commission is a huge hassle I want to avoid altogether.
Against better judgement, I do also own a Tahoe that I bought used just for doing “work”. Towing and doing dirty stuff, Home Depot runs, etc. It’s basically a tool for the DIY stuff I enjoy doing (house construction/work). It’s caused me the most grief, but still not too bad, belts and radiators and alternators, stuff I’ve diy’d because it’s easy but still stuff I’ve never had issues with on Japanese cars.
I only use a shop when it’s going to take a LOT of time.
I’ve opened up my hood a few too many times to find a cap or extra bolts tucked in between the side of the hood and the weatherstrip.
Are duplicates from the new part? Did they assemble it and find they had extra fasteners (I know I have)?
Did they puncture my seat while they were in the car and then gaslight me?
I could go raise hell, but it’s difficult to prove these things and the mechanics I trusted have moved on to better careers in HVAC or elsewhere, so I just put on a podcast and do most of the work myself. It’s not so bad.
Part of the problem is the pay for many tradesmen doesn't go up much for doing better work with more skills and knowledge, the only incentive most of the workers get is to just do it faster. You don't often get a bonus by making beautiful piece of work, you will get a bonus for getting done quicker even if it is the barest minimum quality of work. And many people who would make excellent craftsman are also smart and skilled enough to enter many other fields that pay better and have far less workplace hazards and doesn't involve them having to regularly pump out trash work to stay competitive.
You're paying for:
- Trade licensing fees
- Liability insurance
- Medical insurance
- A vehicle to move equipment around
- Vehicle insurance
- Tools to complete the job
- The time taken to drive to your residence
- The time taken for the quote itself
- The expertise required to correctly spec/quote equipment
- The tradesperson driving to the city office
- The tradesperson applying AND paying for a city permit to do the work
- The tradesperson driving to a supply house
- Purchasing the equipment on credit
- Transporting the equipment back to your house
- Ripping out and disposing the old equipment (if applicable)
- The time and expertise to install the equipment correctly
- The time vacuum out the lineset
- The time charge the equipment properly with refrigerant
- The time commission the system and make sure it's running properly
- The tradesperson driving BACK to the customer house to be present for a city inspection
DIY YouTubers read books, experiment, learn from others, and do extra-research. Most of the trades people are not doing any of that stuff. Almost all residential trades are poorly trained: many go to some trade school, get a job at a local contractor who doesn't want to further train. Unions are good at training; however, they want people to spend four years as an apprentice.
the DIY youtubers also know they will get a thorough drubbing in the comment section and may even lose subscribers if they do it to a poor level. the incentives for shortcuts on a job site by a worker are to get the job done(good enough for a layperson) and leave.
As soon as you learn enough you can start your own business and become the Boss client sees only twice :)
That’s kind of the problem, you don’t need to learn much at all/anything to do this right now. Because the bosses of the world aren’t enforcing any standards in terms of craftsmanship or quality of work. They pretty much just show up to see how much of a mess has been made and how quickly they can patch it up in order to ask for final payment or whatever is needed for completion
DIY also often has the benefit of being the only option when bureaucratic hurdles are in the way. Sometimes, approvals (from the government or from the landlord) are required, which can be hard, onerous, impossible or time-consuming to get.
Ignoring those requirements is often the most practical way with very limited negative consequences.
It also allows using much cheaper units - from what I've heard in Germany the unit (without the install cost!) will cost 2x as much when installed through an official installer compared to a high quality free-market option, but of course the installer will only install units sold through them so many people may be priced out of the legal route completely.
in bay area, install costs for $2k unit are $6k-$8k (took multiple quotes. 3 years ago). very simple install in garage through the wall. "hardest" part was adding 240v disconnect (electrician did it for $300 or so).
You don’t get the “full warranty” when you DIY hvac installs. You also need to call a licensed hvac tech to charge your system if it doesn’t come precharged. Mini splits are easy and I would 1000% DIY. Big, attic mount blower units I would leave to the pros for so many reasons. That said my cousin installed a 21 SEER unit for $5k. I was quoted $35k for the same system (:
I haven't personally had need to do it (yet), but I know multiple people who got the EPA certification to be able to service their own equipment. It can be obtained by taking an online test.
https://www.epa.gov/section608/section-608-technician-certif...
given installation price vs system price, it's possible to trash old one and buy a new few times for a price of professional install.
mrcool also has ducted units that comes with precharged/vacuumed lines. very tempting as one of my hvacs lives on extended timeline and quote for a new one was $25k 2 years ago
I did a 2 ton central air heat pump myself last spring with precharged lines. It was under $4K delivered, I was quoted over $10K.
It was a little scary, I had not done something like that before but a little research and it all turned out fine and has been working well.
> Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense.
This doesn’t get shouted nearly enough. >90% of New England housing stock older than 30 years is not remotely worth the price they’re commanding. They’re either dumpster fires of knob-tube wiring and sagging floors, or contractor “spray foam specials” that make deliberate errors like the OP’s post points out. Yet because zoning laws are strongly tilted in favor of existing owners (and who are predominantly NIMBYs), it makes teardowns a costly affair on their own - and getting approval to build a new structure can take years, if at all.
Housing shouldn’t be disposable, but it should be readily replaceable with modern techniques and efficiency gains, provided it’s up to local code.
I agree with you in principle, but 30 years is probably the wrong number. I have a house in coastal Maine, built in 1997. It's coming up on 30 years. I assure you, it's vastly different than the my first house (1941) or my last (1953), in good ways.
But to your point, we consider way too much to be "historic" and I'd like for that to change. You really should be able to tear down almost anything you'd like and rebuild as long as it's to code/zoning, and zoning needs to be cut back to things like dimensions and use, not appearance. Being old shouldn't make something eligible for historic preservation on its own.
Code should be about fire safety for the fire department if it burns. if you can't build on the lot then it needs to be because of something there - or if they are planning to build it (a new utility) then they need to rebuy the easement every 10 years until they do. Height is limited only by airport flight lines.
everything else is none of your business. (Okay, I might have missed something but it is on those lines)
Height (number of units, really) is limited mainly by the bandwidth of the roads, water mains, and sewers in the area. These are things that are expensive, very expensive to expand. Of course in practice height is firstly limited by zoning to protect existing properties' owners, but you can't ignore the infrastructure needed for larger buildings.
In the United States something simply being old in no way makes it historic in any legal sense (e.g., contributing to a local historic district): integrity[1] matters if you are trying to legally deem a resource historic and worthy of some sort of preservation effort. Generally speaking buildings, structures, or objects need to be at least 50 years old, integrity aside (but there are exceptions if they are particularly noteworthy).
I tend to disagree with the need to tear stuff down just because it's old: it's so terribly wasteful. We need to get better at adapting, reusing, and adding on to older buildings. Granted, when developers just want to use the cheapest materials possible and build something that will start to have serious problems in 20 years, it's a problem, to say nothing of the loss of serious knowledge in various skilled trades.
[1] In most cases the National Register of Historic Places aspects of integrity are used for evaluation: integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.
The price you're paying is mostly for the land, not the house. Land is valuable because it's guaranteed to remain hoardable, closer to gold - it's something you can buy and just ignore while the price goes up.
mid-1800s in new england checking in. No knob in tube here, but guilty as charged on the sagging floors.
I'm in the same boat. No knob and tune, and all the plaster has been removed as well (thankfully by someone else in the houses lifetime).
I've also DIY installed 3 mini split units in the house -- the last one being an AC / DC unit that directly gets powered via 4 panels on the roof during the sunny moments of the day.
Built a new addition 3-4 years back. It's far better insulated than the main structure, but the wood stove and heat pump combo keeps winter mostly at bay.
Anything over 30 years is insane.
How is a plain old AC suddenly considered "green tech" and renamed to "heat pump" in Europe?
It was already answered, but conventional AC systems have resistive heating elements which have a a max efficiency of 100 percent.
Heat pumps run an AC in reverse which can give a COP of 3-4. (300 to 400 percent efficiency)
or if actually burning fuel for heat. Could just remove the need for direct fuel burning altogether. Highly dependent on area, and associated costs. I recommend that you run the numbers for your area
A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse. In the winter, it provides heat; summer, it provides cooling.
It's greener because it's not burning fossil fuels (directly, anyway) vs. a propane / natural gas furnace, and it's more efficient than resistive heating.
> A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse
Is this really the correct terminology? I'd say every AC is a heat pump, whether or not it can run in reverse, because that's how it works. It pumps heat from a colder place to a warmer place.
If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
According to the HVAC industry it is the correct term, based on my experience.
I agree with your logic both modes of operation (heat/cool) are both pumping heat.
Cripple is a fairly strong word here. HVAC is hyper optimized for cost/simplicity at the expense of comfort and efficiency. Which kills me. The industry is also stuck in the 80s in terms of power electronics. Variable speed control on the fans and compressors are a BIG deal. Like 20k for the gear. Even though the BOM cost is dirt cheap. Look at Carrier Infinity if you are curious
MANY Megawatts worth of power would be saved if they just included a directional valve, some speed control PCB and electronic expansion valve
> Cripple is a fairly strong word here.
Well... I'm in Europe, so I don't know if I ever saw a heat pump that can't operate both ways :-)
Until recently, they've not been as common here in the US. Fossil fuels are just so much cheaper for the end customer, and central HVAC units in homes are much more common here.
The US is somehow very ahead and very behind at the same time :)
> If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
Yes, it pumps heat, but it's generally not referred to as a heat pump if it doesn't have a reversing valve and all the accoutrements that go with it (coil defrost heater, etc). I wouldn't say not having all those parts make it crippled, a refrigerator/freezer isn't crippled because it can't heat food, although some commercial units can be set to keep cold food cold or hot food hot because they have reversing valves.
If you have utility natural gas at reasonable prices, gas fired heat can be very economical, and it might not be forseable that you would ever use electricity for heating, in which case a reversing valve is a waste of capital.
Kind of a pointless observation.
The words "air conditioner" don't literally mean much at all. It doesn't refer to a humidifier or a hepa filter for instance, yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize.
Same for heat pump.
I view "heat pump" as a technical term describing how some heaters/coolers/dehumidifiers/clothes driers/fridges work. Wikipedia seems to somewhat agree with me, although article about heat pumps seems focused on space heaters and coolers.
> yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize
Well, yes, in US it apparently means "heat pump based space cooler". Where I live it means "heat pump based space heater and cooler".
Its more complex to have a reversible heat pump, because in addition to the reversing valve, you also need two metering devices and a bypass for each of them.
Often "heat pump" refers to a reversible AC, which is not every AC, so they're not synonymous. In places where it's always too hot, or always too cold, no need to bother with the reversing option, just install it the way it'll always be used. In places that are typically an alright temperature, which means they're sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold, you want it reversible.
How did you charge your unit? Did you learn how to do that and get the EPA certificate or did you convince someone to come out and do that?
There are minisplits that are precharged. For example mrcool. Very easy installation. No need to vacuum anything
Have few friends who got certificates in order to charge their
Great question. The unit is pre charged for 25 feet of lineset . I was right at the limit for my install.
I installed the lines, did all the vacuum related work. Then just cracked the valve on the unit to distribute the refrigerant.
I had a bottle of refrigerant on standby from a buddy. Didn’t need to use it . I was going to get the EPA cert, if my buddy didn’t exist. I heard it’s super straightforward
The vacuum work, finding/fixing leaks, etc can be a real nightmare, even with the expensive equipment. Personally I would much rather pay an HVAC technician to just come and pull the vacuum. They already have the gear, and they can diagnose when your vacuum still doesn't pull all the way for the 3rd time. Then if you don't get a precharged unit, they can also fill it.
that is IF the technician cares enough... unless you guys have stringent regulatory/right incentives in place. sometimes tech just relies on the brand reputation and pull for 10mins calls it a day
Your link to the Mitsubishi support site doesn't seem correct.
I just checked the link. I believe it is correct. The domain name looks sketchy, but it has all the nitty gritty engineering data.
If I remember correctly, I think I found a link from the actual Mitsubishi website linking to it
Did you try connecting to the server?
A Google search on the hostname does return entries for Mitsubishi, DNS points to AWS.
Yes. I might be missing something obvious. Are we talking about the my link drive website? If so, yes. I clicked the link from my website and it took me straight to the website with no issue.
I might be misunderstanding something
If we're talking about https://mylinkdrive.com/USA/M_Series I also can't access it, I get:
Hmmmm. That’s is VERY odd. That links resolves fine in my phone . I’m US based. I wonder if they have some sort of geo blocking
According to https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/mylinkdrive.com, it resolves in most of the US locations and in Japan, China, and Singapore, but fails elsewhere.
https://dnschecker.org/#A/mylinkdrive.com gives similar results - resolves fine in North America (US/Canada/Mexico) and a few other counties (Brazil/Ireland/Russia/China, and one of the two Australia sites), but fails elsewhere (including in Singapore).
Geoblocking seems like a possibility.
Fails in the UK.
I replaced my central air heat pump myself last spring. Outside unit and inside air exchange.
The inside unit happened to fit pretty well with a little adjustment in the place the old one (from the 1980s) had been, and I made my own connections to the ductwork. I placed the 2 ton outside unit on the pad where the old one had been. I did have an AC company come and remove the Freon from the old unit, then I cut it up and took it to the scrap yard.
I was able to do this with no vacuuming lines as they sell precharged kits with lines similar to mini splits. It's been over a year and it worked like a charm through summer and winter. It took about 5 days or a week including removing the old unit, pulling the lines under the house, setting the inside and outside units and buttoning everything up. The reason it even took a week was a I did it entirely myself including moving the units with roller logs.
I saved over $6,000 from what I was quoted from an HVAC company which I felt was entirely worth a week of manual labor.
> depreciated
Sorry but it's deprecated
Depreciate means to lower the estimated value of something. Pretty sure that's what GP meant. "Deprecate" doesn't fit here.
Oh you're right, I misread :(
The OP spent $42,000 (with somehow over a month of work) to install a mini split and then $1000/mo to run it some months just because they couldn’t bother to find the massive leaks in their apartment? Am I on drugs?
There's a related post from the same blog about using Bitcoin mining for space heating. Whatever one may think about Bitcoin, I kinda get the impression that practicality isn't at all high on the author's list.
just NY things
Honestly! That was my thought too
That is so crazy expensive to install and $1000 / month electricity bill what!?
I mean $350/h for a plumber? I live in an expensive country and even here you get basically 2.5 plumbers for that price.
> Still when I ask Claude.AI to double-check the math on our power consumption, it thinks we have an incredibly leaky apartment. Like ridiculously off the charts. This also lines up with my inability to run a humidifier in the winter. I got the biggest, baddest humidifier I could find, and it barely makes a difference.
I would have started figuring this out before spending any money on a mini-split. OP, your climate envelope has failed somewhere. Spend some more money on a IR camera and try and identify where that leak is. Your basically just air-conditioning some of your apartment and some of the outdoors.
Their electricity company might do the inspection as free. Ours does. They even offer grants to deal with some of the issues.
This is a good idea, and they can check for additional issues with the electrical. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their meter was hooked up to multiple units or common spaces. The electric company had mixed up every single meter in my old condo build for 15 years.
They don’t say what the kWh usage is, just that the electricity cost in $$ is over $1000 on the highest month. For a unit surrounded by what should be other conditioned spaces, that’s insane to me.
A quick web search indicates that nyc $/kwh is about 31c. So that’s 3225kwh in one month! My standalone house plus pool pump, dual zone ac, and ev charger doesn’t even come close. Clearly there is a major insulation issue which is the root cause and everything else is just trying to put bandaids on an arterial bleed.
FTA:
> We do have bad aluminum-framed windows, and we also have no insulation in our ceiling, so maybe all the heat goes to our upstairs neighbors. I also have various fans sucking air out of the apartment non-stop, one in each bathroom and one from the clothes dryer (when I hold an incense stick up to it I can see it pulling in air even when it’s not running), plus I have an elevator that opens into the apartment which might have a chimney effect.
They not only have zero insulation, they have negative insulation. They would have saved more money/energy by simply stopping all the heat/cold loss. And (at least in my state) they'd still get rebates for installing new insulation.
There is something seriously wrong with this person’s apartment.
I have a three bed circa 1897 coop in Brooklyn. We have the leakiest windows this side of the Mississippi with multiple in-window air conditioners and my bill never goes above $450 in the summer (that’s probably about 250-300 in comparable usage for the middle of the country).
I have a 4,000 square foot house with two central air conditioners and a swimming pool. I don't think i've ever paid more than $350 a month.
Yeah, we live far north of NYC where it gets much colder, and have never spent nearly that much on heating. Even when we lived in a converted barn from the 1930s with single pane windows and no wall insulation, the most we ever spent was about $500/month. Now (new construction, triple-pane windows, ground-sourced heat pump) it’s more like $80/month
Old brownstone apartments probably had poor insulation. Add to it that Brooklyn electricity charges are much higher than the New York average.
If they're paying $1000/month at 30c/kWh, they could quite nearly run the latest over-the-counter bitcoin miner 24/7 with that amount of electricity usage.
They have terrible insulation.
they had a unit that uses resistive heating if it gets too cold instead of the heat pump which adds up in the cold ny winters I'd gather.
Freaking expensive! And with bad service? Wow. I live in the northeast of Brazil, 27–32 °C all year, every day. When I installed a heat pump for our bedroom, it cost me about $500 for a Midea unit, $50 to prepare an electrical outlet, and $100 for installation, which was done in a single day. Service here isn’t great, but I guess it’s five stars compared to New York’s
My electricity cost to run this unit every night is ~$55 extra
> Freaking expensive!
Right!?
I live in India. The summers can be 40C. So $500 for an extremely energy efficient split-ac from a local manufacturer that does up to 12K BTU/h and $50 for installation.
I ran it 16h every day at 40% capacity for 2-3 months with the rotary inverter compressor pulling about 250-300W when cooling for a total power consumption of about 180 kWh per month.
Here in Australia it takes barely a day to install a couple of split ACs and maybe 1-2000 USD all-in (Mitsubishi Electric; Midea would be cheaper of course).
No idea how they justify the time and cost over there.
Then again they pay tens of thousands of dollars to install solar when it's 1/10th of the price here.
Everything and everyone in the US have lost their minds. It's definitely an empire in it's final days.
I had this done recently, also in a Brooklyn apartment, and this article made me appreciate that my contractor was insanely good. The main reason I didn’t DIY it was because I thought it would be hard to get the condo board to agree to it, but after watching them do the work I realized there was no way I could have done it myself. Not really because of the HVAC part, but because of the cutting through exterior walls and snaking the line through the walls. It took about 2 days, the quality of the work was very good, and they even worked around my kid’s nap schedule. They have also been very prompt when I’ve needed service calls since then. Overall it was a huge amount of money well spent.
You will be able to charge people money for that contractor's phone number.
I’m in Park Slope and have a similar use case. Can you share the name of the company you went with?
Of course, just send me an email
I love heat pumps, but the author should have had an energy audit done first. Likely a thermal camera on a cold day would quickly identify their envelope issues.
> one from the clothes dryer (when I hold an incense stick up to it I can see it pulling in air even when it’s not running)
A normal vented clothes dryer can vent something like 8000 cu ft of air in a normal drying cycle (i.e. all of the air in their apartment). If that's running all the time somehow, that could definitely explain a lot. If that's the case they should fix it, and maybe explore ventless heatpump dryers.
Doesn't need to be a heatpump dryer, just needs to be ventless.
E.g. the 20+ year old common German dryer that runs the clothes air closed-loop, first through the clothes, then to a heat exchanger with drainage geometry (typically feeding into a tray you have to pull out and pour out after each cycle), then across an electric heater, circulation fan, and back to the clothes. A second fan blows room air across the heat exchanger; the dryer action relies on the clothes being much warmer than room temperature such that the desired relative humidity of/at the clothes doesn't survive the cold from the room temperature.
Yeah, modern heat pump dryers are just nice and have cycle times more in line with North American expectations, but you’re right that alternatives have been around a long time!
Spending 42k instead of adding some $2/free improvised shims to fix the AC angle to drip outside sure is a life decision. Especially when you learn where this is (I won't dox the author). BKUSA baby! We attract the smartest hippest people.
The article did mention there are other benefits, noise, improved temperature hysteresis, the ability to actually provide sufficient heat during the cold months.
Ever spend time in a hotel room with a noisy, rattly AC that turned on and off all the time because it couldn't maintain the temperatures at the set point? Hard to get decent sleep.
Getting work done in your apartment in NYC always feels like being extorted.
Also, most of them are shockingly incompetent. It took years to assemble a list of quality service providers. I pay a little more but stuff works now.
Yeah I agree. I accidentally walked out my front door without my keys in my pocket for the first time in my life. I called my property management company who sent over a technician to unlock the door. The management company intentionally does such a poor job that there is no spare key to my apartment. So the technician has to drill the lock. Surprise! The technician only claims they have a lock-drilling skill.
My phone dies and the technician says I have to call a locksmith and pay for it myself. Now I’m in small claims court for $1275 no good reason other than my property management company enabling extortion by a locksmith. All they had to do was hire or train someone into being competent lock driller.
Real estate industry in this city is a toxic grift game. People are very nice here, but these real estate people are the “assholes” in which everyone refers. The whole thing is rotten except for maybe 5% of landlords.
FWIW I would consider nobody other than me having access to a key to my apartment a feature!
That’s nuts though. Imagine a locksmith not being able to pick a lock. Like… you have one job?!
Because he’s not a locksmith, he is a contracted technician that performs duties in the illegal absence of a building super. There are more details to my case that will just make your jaw drop more but I chose to keep focused on the fundamentals. And yes if I owned the apartment I would not want property management having a key. However I include that detail to indicate how poorly managed my building is without listing off 10 other things.
Ah, apologies misunderstood
Some locks are much harder to pick.
Especially if you don’t bring basic tools and bore the whole thing out with a drill and then give up when it doesn’t magically open.
Drilling the lock is literally what emergency locksmiths do. This isn't a Mission Impossible movie. Bet you don't forget your key now.
Without attempting a pick?
Only the grifters.
Locksmiths won't do that in general - even if they know how. Picking makes it look easy - not only can they not justify their bill but also people ask if locks provide any security and that is bad for business.
I watched a locksmith pick someone's apartment door in 10 seconds and then charge them $80. Then everyone commented on how easy it looked and the locksmith was very friendly about it.
I have yet to see the first emergency locksmith that isn't a grifter. The moment you can't open a lock yourself, you're paying ten times the reasonable rate, or worse.
It's usually cheaper to knock in a window, or if you live in an expensive area, to buy a fire axe and break down the door.
The trick is to to find real locksmiths, with a real storefront, preferably ahead of time. If you just Google emergency locksmith and your ZIP code or location, all of the top results will be scammers in unmarked vans. This is an old scam, it's got its own Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam
There's been some reporting about these fake listings on Google maps: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-maps-fake-listings-lawsu...
For anyone wondering, PTAC is an acronym for one of those through-the-wall hotel room AC units.
More specifically, Pass-Through Air Conditioner.
Packaged terminal air conditioner actually, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_condit...
That'll teach me to assume. I was taught not to do it and sometimes I still make the mistake. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditio...
"but it also meant that our ground-floor neighbors don’t have a window blocked that’s under the stairs."
That's a thing you could have done, cover their window with your AC unit? It seems like something that planning regulations should prevent. And still, they have a loud compressor right next to their window.
the HVAC industry in the US is absolute highway robbery, I was quoted $10k to install a $1k mini split that took a total novice (me) a weekend to install - the most difficult part of the process was figuring out the best place to route the copper lines (because you have to be careful not to pinch them around a corner)
a friend paid a similar company the same and the work looks like total garbage, they're didn't even properly set the pad to place the outdoor unit on - and the techs are absolutely clueless about how the systems work
> Still when I ask Claude.AI to double-check the math on our power consumption, it thinks we have an incredibly leaky apartment. Like ridiculously off the charts.
Ah. That answers my question about how you ventilate the apartment for fresh air: it's thoroughly perforated.
> Installation This was supposed to take a week and a half, two weeks max. It took more than a month.
This sounds very strange to me. I installed ACs on all three floors in my house in a day. (Not in the US)
I just did an 18K BTU mini split in my garage myself with no HVAC background for around $1K and $300 in tools. For a little more capacity this guy paid 30-40x the price.
This article is a perfect example of why I moved out of NYC. Contractors there are more likely to be dishonest, less skilled and more expensive and have insane leverage over rich apartment dwellers who might own a screwdriver but basically have no ability (or permission) to do anything themselves.
Smart, productive people thus have large parts of their lives eaten up dealing with things that are trivial in a large majority of the country because of the density. I decided I’d rather spend my time pursuing my own goals not basic daily comfort.
I had to read that line three times to convince myself there was not an extra zero in that 40k figure. It's insane.
Somewhere in Staten Island or NJ some guy with a beat up old van and an HVAC license is shopping for speed boats off this.
If all of the trades were there on the same day and each could begin their work immediately after the prior specialist had finished it might have taken a day or a few, but it sounds like much of that month was simply waiting. If you're handy and in a part of the world where you can just do all of this work yourself at your own pace its no surprise you can be much faster.
NYC is a famously difficult place to have work like this done, especially in a shared-ownership building like a condo. You need your neighbors to agree its okay to do, your board/management company needs to review and be satisfied with the insurance your contractors carry, the city has requirements for electrical that always require permits and often require a master electrician to do the work, and even once the work starts the walls and spaces you're working in aren't exclusively yours and your contractors will be discovering things along the way... plumbing for that spigot you didn't know your neighbor had on their terrace, roof drains, etc.
The process of just getting approval to do work can vary from "chill but time consuming" in small buildings to "impenetrable bureaucracy so don't bother if you're not using the approved vendors" in large co-ops. Once it starts, that master electrician you hired to run the 220v service isn't gonna waste his time repairing drywall, a cheaper subcontractor will do that, and the latency just cranks up from there
I love city living and understand that most of these rules and regulations exist because bad things happened when they didn't - frankly I wouldn't trust most of my neighbors in buildings I've lived in to do their own electrical work or pierce the building's envelope for any reason - but also sort of understand where the outsider's perception that city homeowner life is hard and expensive comes from. It very often is, by comparison.
There is a way around this, but it is board driven: a group buy is arranged and the entire building is done at once. The board or a GC they hire subs out the work and coordinates order of operations, and uses known good contractors from references. It’s for sure a coordination challenge, but it can be done if the will is there and residents are friendly to collaboration. Otherwise, it’s just pain (having coordinated electrification refits for ~50 unit buildings).
>Overall this cost us about $40k
About $10,000 per unit (including the PTAC removal/wall repair), sheesh. A new mini split in my St Louis (city) house was $5.5k, and that was one rung up from lowball $4k contractor.
Also, instead of the OEM wifi module, i had success with a sensibo, which has temp/hum/CO2/TVOC sensor, HomeKit control, and an IR blaster. I took that route when I learned the wifi module was locked down to their app, with no HomeKit.
> How much money did we save? Not as much as expected. The most expensive month in the next winter was $1000.
$1,000/month to heat a 3br apartment? Holy crap is he keeping it at sauna temperatures? The most I've ever spent on my poorly-insulated 1960's era bilevel house is about $250.
If your bedrooms are upstairs, at night you might be running heat a lot less since some of the heat from the first floor rises up to the second. If you have carpet, that can create a warmer area at the floor, closer to where your beds are. So you might not need to heat things as much, or to as high a temperature to feel comfortable.
I lived in an apartment where the floor was poorly insulated. When a new neighbor moved in downstairs that heated their bedroom more aggressively at night, my heating bill went down because the heat rising from below made it less necessary to run my own heating as hard.
It might also be the difference in electricity cost. Especially with tiered rates, you can easily find yourself moving into a higher tier where every kW is significantly more expensive than in the previous tiers. PG&E in the SF Bay Area charges between 43 and 60c/kWh. A 2kW heater is going to cost about $1/hr to run , so if you're working from home, have little kids it gets expensive quick. And in the middle of a NY winter, with a poorly isolated apartment, you might well be running the heat in some capacity pretty much 24/7.
Con Ed rates are about 0.16/kWh so in their case it's not the cost of electricity, it's all the things explained after the $1000/month line, a ridiculous lack of insulation and lack of air-tightness.
They may also keep the heat higher than most people. There's mention of an au pair so there must be a small child.
It's more like $0.30+ when you account for delivery, which costs more than supply. And then some fees on top of that.
Thanks. When the cost in different regions are compared, I thought it was customary to only include the generation, not the delivery.
I'm with you on this. That cost seems excessive. Mind you, they should including be quoting kwh usage as price varies by region. And they should be talking about the temperature differential they are maintaining.
Thanks for taking the time to do such a thorough writeup on this - it's fascinating to compare with the install we did a couple of months ago on our house in the UK.
We already installed a Daikin Altherma 3 air-to-water heat pump three years ago, which heats around a thousand meters of underfloor pipework + domestic hot water cylinder, but recently added a Daikin air-to-air heat pump. This is relatively new to the UK, at least in homes, so there aren't many contractors in the market yet.
Making good afterwards is certainly the challenge - I'm still repairing the plasterboard (drywall) holes, which I needed to make for access into the eaves. (I preferred this to having lots of external plastic trunking.)
I'm looking forward to seeing how the air-to-air heat pump helps with our winter humidity.
This makes me feel a lot better about having just laid down $5,000 on 6 units with installation included...
And $1,000 for the Wi-Fi module? I was looking at the part when comparing the cheaper and more expensive units (which either don't or do come with it from the factory), it's $60 to buy separately.
I control my Mitsubishi mini-splits with an esp32. I’d never done any soldering or worked with a microcontroller before, but I was able to install this into 4 units in a single day.
This esphome project has great integration with home-assistant and Apple Home and I’d highly recommend this approach over the Mitsubishi app if your unit is supported and you’re willing to do a little work.
https://github.com/echavet/MitsubishiCN105ESPHome
I didn’t know what a PTAC is:
Packaged Terminal Air Conditioners (PTAC) are self-contained heating and cooling systems designed to be installed through a wall, commonly used in hotels and apartments.
You’ve probably seen them at a hotel.
https://www.amana-ptac.com/
I have a similar experience with a heat pump saving a lot less money than I expected.
Poor insulation does not explain it, a heat pump should still be heating that poorly insulated space at much higher efficiency that space heaters.
The physics makes sense but I wonder how strictly these units are tested. The control loops for things like deicing the outdoor coils are complex.
I don’t think the previous system was using space heaters though, the PTAC they had before presumably had a heat pump in it if it was generating condensation.
I think their complaint was it was falling back to resistive heating for most of winter (so basically a space heater)
Not directly relevant, but my PTAC in NYC started having issues this summer just as things got hot (of course).
The compressor would come on for a few seconds then shut off.
After 2 different HVAC companies quoted me $275 to come out (plus hourly and the repair once they find the issue) and then also told me it would be 10 days before they had availability I finally bit the bullet, bought a $30 multimeter, watched a few videos on how capacitor failure is super common and how to hopefully not kill myself, and after confirming with the multimeter and buying the $7 capacitor everything was right back to working with 2 minutes of work.
I did have a moment where I dreaded thinking I'd need to replace the unit and if so whether I'd want a split put in but for $53K I'd better get a third job... Quite glad not to have had to get too far down this road.
I had something similar happen, but for a gas boiler (hot water radiators). Our was older, but not super old. It would intermittently turn off and we couldn’t figure it out. HVAC Contractor (who we had a maintenance contract with) thought the system was toast and needed a replacement. I noticed a bad capacitor (was blown). HVAC contractor claimed they couldn’t find one through their suppliers. I had two delivered five days later.
When they came back to check the system for a full quote, the tech felt so bad that they just installed the new capacitor for free and we got another few years out of that boiler.
HVAC must be one of the most dishonest professions in the US. I’m not in NYC but received similar quotes($15-20k to do a few rooms).
Obviously having family in South America where there are millions of these installed by unskilled labor I decided to DIY. So I installed 2 units with 2 heads each, including pouring the concrete pads, vacuuming the line sets, and charging them. Took me two weekends and about $4000 in materials including the units themselves. It’s been two years, none of the BS fear mongering issues have happened, and they have almost paid for themselves.
Private equity has been buying out HVAC companies in the US. The technician are forced to drive up sales. So instead of repairing something, they now recommend new equipment. I saw this difference in behavior at an HVAC company I used for a 10 years. The owners were retiring and the private equity bought them out. You really have to go by word of mouth and seek out the smaller companies.
Similar thing happened for Veterinary care clinics.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HVAC/comments/16asntf/lets_talk_abo...
There is a very different pattern I learned to recognize with Private Equity electricians. Its not all negative- they have fast availability and good communication (because they have office staff), but that’s the end of the good stuff.
You call for one broken outlet and they pull out fancy branded folders and pens with checklists of every little thing that could possibly be upgraded (inplying its needed for safety) present you with a multi $K bill and then do a little magic 10% discount for some reason to make you think its a good deal.
That said I get my petty revenge by asking questions at the free consult (marketing opportunity) then hiring local guys instead, whenever I cam find them.
RAM Air in San Marcos, south of Austin. Ask for Edgar. He's self trained and likes to rebuild boards from scratch. He'll service out to west Austin if the job is big enough. He mostly trains techs. So, if you ask, he'll happily walk you through a repair in the phone. (Most jobs are only 20–40m.) He makes his money on the big jobs with repeat customers. When he retires ... fuck me.
Many HVAC technicians are not good at service calls (troubleshoot and fix); they are sales people in disguise. I also heard many local HVAC/plumbing companies are owned by private equity of sorts.
They even have DIY friendly ones now where you don't even need a vacuum pump (not that it's hard but it is one more thing). So easy
The part that always makes me chicken out is the electrical, did you have any issues with that part?
The electrical is relatively easy. It's not much harder than replacing a frayed power cord on a lamp (with an extra wire if the unit is 220 rather than 110).
Managing the lineset is the scary part (though it's not that hard). You're vacuuming copper lines that you've hopefully sealed correctly. If you get that wrong and your refrigerant yeets off into the sky, you have to call in help because it's hard for an unlicensed person to get the refrigerant legally. That half-hour of work and ~$1 of materials will cost you a punitive amount of money.
It should be super-easy these days to get the license.
Ten years ago, I downloaded a free study guide and took the test in-person at an A/C supply shop for about $50.
Today, you can take the test online.
Thanks to ripping off by HVAC contractors, many are signing up for EPA 608 certification to get the refrigerant legally.
It’s really easy, 220v is not that hard to install and is the scam scam run by people installing ev chargers.
You do have to go through the permitting process which means having someone come out to view it and write off on it and if you state it properly it should be less than $200.
Electrical is both surprisingly easy and surprisingly hard.
The actual work involved is relatively easy and straightforward. However, the code and regulations are extremely difficult to navigate. There’s a lot of non-obvious things you have to do to be code-compliant.
Some understanding of electrical circuits, split phase motors, and control circuits (using step down transformers, relays, contactors) is extremely helpful. HVAC systems contains at least two motors--blower motor inside and compressor motor outside. And control circuits are activated by a thermostat.
I wish I could do this, but it’s not an option when you rent. PTACs have been nothing but trouble.
I have rented for a few decades, primarily from older owners' crappier 2nd-homes, typically the last remants of older housing in gentrifying parts of working-class towns. My ideal landlord doesn't want to invest anything in their rental, other than bare-minimums for legal habitability [even then..].
This has four-times given me immense negotiating leverage, with the trade-off of having to provide my own labor for minimal standards of living (e.g. I currently pay ~40% below-market, but am responsible for all HVAC/mech/pest maintenance; example: recently replaced the water heater).
Have you asked your landlord if you can modify your apartment, or is it a corporate no-returned-calls situation?
It’s the corporate kind.
It costs next to nothing if you do it like the K-man
https://youtu.be/62NyFTAKgOI?si=SQR-FDoq3CF4UvIy
This makes me happy my house has ductwork and HVAC plumbing from the attic to outdoors. I don’t have an AC yet but it seems like it’ll be easier than this.
I control all my Mitsubishi minisplits with sensibo. There’s an official Mitsubishi WiFi box too but it’s like $1000.
Sounds like the previous owners spent a lot of money to do something that wasn’t better than nothing. What a waste.
seems outrageous to me. money would've been better spent removing all dry wall and existing insulation, spraying in closed spray foam, putting up the sheetrock and repainting, and then buying a single portable inverter air condition unit.
> I can install some wifi extension for $1000
Take a look at Sensibo. I have one and I'm pretty happy about it.
On a similar note, I have some Daikin AC units, expensive ones and of course they didn’t come with wifi module which Daikin prices at 100+ Euro per module. After some searching around I found the Faikin [1] project and got one module to test for around 30 Euro and it works brilliantly for 1/3 of the price and provides even more functionality from what I’ve read with seamless HA integration.
[1] https://github.com/revk/ESP32-Faikin
If you just want to be able to control the ACs remotely, without remote sensing, you can buy some cheap IoT IR blasters (around $15–30 for Zigbee or WiFi versions). They'll often have control schemes you can download for your specific equipment (cloning the IR remote control that came with the AC).
yeah the wifi addons are complete rip offs, they're like $20 in components tops - plenty of people diy their own
The best thing we can do for the environment is to tear down old houses and build modern ones in their place.
I say that even though I live in a historic house that I’d hate to see go away.
That said, I’ve spent a fortune bringing it up to modern energy efficiency standards.
Why on earth would you spend this kind of money on an apt you don't even own?
> We bought this apartment at the end of 2023
First sentence of the Prologue.