Hacker News Reader

Comment by gehwartzen | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I would recommend just doing it yourself. Especially if you have a contractor pull in the electrical connection for it. I installed a pre-charged unit in a much more complicated attic setup (condenser mounted to outside wall on second floor, 20' of refrigerant lines run with lots of angles) and the whole thing took 6-8 hours with no experience. Mounting it to a shed where you're basically just cutting a hole in a wall and the indoor unit and outdoor unit are in more or less the same location should be extremely straight forward. The unit cost me less than $1k five years ago and has been running perfectly ever since.

View on HN

I think the plumbing is by far the hardest part. Electrical is pretty easy. Hard to screw that up.

But if you screw up the refrigerant lines, they will leak over time, and your machines will not only stop cooling and the motor will burn out, but HVAC personnel who are licensed to buy refrigerant and re-charge your lines will refuse to work on DIY lines because they then will incur legal liability.

I installed my own and paid an HVAC company to very my connections were good, and when it came time to release the refrigerant into the lines, the guy told me I had to do it for legal liability reasons.

if someone finds out you did this yourself then can't the city put a lien on your property preventing a sale until you rip everything out and have it re-done by a licensed person? I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..

> I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..

Where? No electrician is inspecting every house that goes up for sale in the US. Sure you can ask an electrician to inspect a house electrical… but that doesn’t bar a house sale anywhere I’ve ever seen.

For the home inspections I've been a "walkthrough witness" to, the "electrical inspection" portion involved the inspector opening the normal access door to the breaker panel levers, and plugging in one of those $5 Home Depot wiring fault detectors into a few random plugs here and there to verify no wiring faults appear.

But they do not remove the panel cover to look inside, nor do they open up any receptacle box anywhere to look at any of the wiring inside. So they wouldn't know (nor discover) if the wiring job was done well or done in a shoddy manner.

Better home inspections will remove breaker panel box or at very minimum use a thermal camera to check if the breakers are all reasonably warm. Usually both. But that still doesn’t really tell you much about whether something is done to code or not.

Barring very obvious problems, I think you're way overestimating how deeply either home inspectors or town/cities are going to be deeply inspecting (especially older) properties and/or permits. My property is over 200 years old and a lot of the work on it has been licensed but there is doubtless a lot that is older.

AFAIK the biggest risk is disclosure. Some states (Oregon for sure) explicitly require the seller to disclose unpermitted work. It's part of the standard forms you fill out with your realtor when making the listing.

They won't stop you from selling the house as-is but some buyers will walk, some will demand you get it permitted, most will at least want a real inspection done. Getting as-built work permitted after the fact will cost 2-3x as much in permit costs than it would have if done properly, and it may require you to remove drywall to expose things for inspection, but as long as it meets code you won't have to rip everything out and have it redone by a licensed person. In most places you can do work on your own house, so it's the lack of permit that needs to be remedied.

Home inspections are pretty normal when you buy a property. I have no idea what work on my >200 year-old house was permitted. While the latest batch was, I'm guessing a great deal wasn't. But I don't actually know. And, if you're buying a >200 year old house, you know that along with a lot of other things.

Inspections are common but mostly just a surface examination. They cannot, for example, inspect electrical wiring. They can recommend you hire an electrical inspector.

I just sold a 120 year old house. “I don’t know” is a valid answer to the disclosure requirement but it better be true.

Or have plausible deniability.

When I've have had some new windows installed a couple of times, the installer tacked on a lead mitigation fee which was fine because they knew there was probably lead paint buried somewhere but I don't actually specifically know about lead paint buried under layers of newer paint and the like and most of the interior has been reworked to a significant degree.

If you personally really care, don't buy an old house. (Also, when I had the latest round of rework after a kitchen fire, my electrician replaced a bunch of remaining knob and tube wiring which probably dated to whenever the house was electrified.)

Yeah you have to be committed to buy an old house. It's fun but can be a lot of work. I was selling the home I grew up in after my mom passed, so getting it sold was my only priority. We ended up not doing anything but refinish some old floors (not because they really needed fixing per se, but because an original doug fir floor in good condition here brings way more in value than it costs to have done). The electrical was a mix of modern and knob & tube. Buyer didn't bat an eye, they knew the score. They also wanted the house so bad they agreed to eat the cost of the sewer line replacement that was basically mandatory (good old terracotta & rotted out cast iron, I wonder what we will think of PVC/ABS/HPDE in a hundred years).

Speaking of lead ... I was surprised we didn't get any pushback from the floor guys on that. Someone had painted parts of the floors, then laid linoleum in the middle, and my mom had a lot of it covered in carpet that was really in rough shape at this point. I couldn't get a positive test on the paint for lead with an inexpensive test kit but I really would be surprised if there wasn't any. But the guys doing the floor didn't even bring it up. And this is work they specialize in, so they deal with a lot of floors this vintage.

>The electrical was a mix of modern and knob & tube. Buyer didn't bat an eye, they knew the score.

That's sort of the key. If you have your eye on a >100 year old home, love on unless you're OK with a lot of what probably comes with that.

> I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house.

In Texas every homeowner is legally entitled to work on their own electrical system without oversight from an electrician.

In the SF Bay Area, I'd bet good money that the vast majority of work like that is unpermitted. When I was adding an EV charging station to my home, I actually paid a (reputable, licensed) electrician and he rolled his eyes hard at me when I asked about permits. He said it would add weeks to the project and double the cost. Without it, it was a three-hour job.

The city isn't in the business of busting doors and issuing citations if you replace kitchen cabinets without a permit. They basically act if someone credibly complains, which is mostly if you're doing some exterior additions / changes that annoy a neighbor.

I mean...what are the odds of that? And if it does happen, it sounds like a hassle, but the overall cost in that scenario probably isn't THAT much higher than having the licensed person do it in the first place?

Sure, if the odds are 50/50, or you go to jail, or the fines are $50k or something, then yeah, do it right from the start.

But if there's a 2% chance of getting caught, getting caught costs you 150%, and not getting caught costs you 10%...the choice is pretty obvious here, isn't it?

Pulling in the electrical connection is actually simpler. So you might as well do that yourself too.

It is, but you'd be surprised at the number of folks who will DIY stuff, but won't DIY anything electrical.

Insurance won't cover it if you're found to have non-code electrical as the source of a fire. Electricians are expensive, but it's worth having one inspect your work to correct/teach you the approved install method.

So you do it according to the code or better. No cheaping out on components, no shoddy work. Insurance won't revive you or your loved cat either.

Ideally yes. For me I found following the code difficult. Then compound that with needing to know the NECA <https://www.necanet.org/topics/codesandstandards/neis/the-st...> + the state codes. It's non-contiguous in the way it's written so you need to know the relevant sections and how to apply them together. Simple things add up; proper color coding of wiring, knowing how much sleeve to leave in at the edge of a box, what cable nuts are appropriate size for the number of wires bonded, size of box needed based on number of wires, how/where boxes can be mounted, space between EMT in bends, what size bus-bar is appropriate and what can share it.

To the first approximation you have to control thermal output of your wiring.

Since it's I^2*R, you have to size your wires according to max sustained current, take into account thermal conductivity of where your wires are placed and keep all contacts tight. Also size circuit breakers according to that max current so they trip before the whole thing catastrophically overheats. Which is a trivial exersize in itself.

Short-to-case and leak current protection (the reason for three-wire systems/PE conductors and differential protection) takes second place. In larger installations there are also considerations about grounding / ground loops, but that usually does not matter for residential.

This is what the most of the code should be about (I never read US ones, but was doing apartments/small homes for like 20 years already).

The rest, as in colors, sleeves and exact connectors used is helpful, but not critical, and if you think that a typical contractor would not botch it up in a most horrible way, well..

Your big assumption is that just because an “electrician” did it doesn’t mean they did it following the relevant code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com