Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment

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.

Sorry but it's deprecated

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.

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.

That is so crazy expensive to install and $1000 / month electricity bill what!?

> 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Similar thing happened for Veterinary care clinics.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HVAC/comments/16asntf/lets_talk_abo...

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?

[1] https://github.com/revk/ESP32-Faikin

First sentence of the Prologue.