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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Readit News
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
There is huge gap in the market for tradespeople who take their work even semi-seriously.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Have few friends who got certificates in order to charge their
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
If I remember correctly, I think I found a link from the actual Mitsubishi website linking to it
Sorry but it's deprecated
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.
That is so crazy expensive to install and $1000 / month electricity bill what!?
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.
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).
They have terrible insulation.
My electricity cost to run this unit every night is ~$55 extra
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.