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Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment

112 points by ibobev 1y ago

steveBK123 1y ago
Getting work done in your apartment in NYC always feels like being extorted.
- righthand 1y ago
  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.
  - simonjgreen 1y ago
    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?!
    - Projectiboga 1y ago
      Some locks are much harder to pick.
      - righthand 1y ago
        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.
    - righthand 1y ago
      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.
      - simonjgreen 1y ago
        Ah, apologies misunderstood
  - bigbadcity 1y ago
    Drilling the lock is literally what emergency locksmiths do. This isn't a Mission Impossible movie. Bet you don't forget your key now.
    - sejje 1y ago
      Without attempting a pick? Only the grifters.
      - jeroenhd 1y ago
        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.
        exhilaration 1y ago
        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 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-lawsuit-scams/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-maps-fake-listings-lawsu...
      - bluGill 1y ago
        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.
        gametorch 1y ago
        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.
- silverlake 1y ago
  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.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
For anyone wondering, PTAC is an acronym for one of those through-the-wall hotel room AC units.
- lsaferite 1y ago
  More specifically, Pass-Through Air Conditioner.
  - giraffe_lady 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditioner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditio...
  - grasbergerm 1y ago
    Packaged terminal air conditioner actually, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditioner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_condit...
    - lsaferite 1y ago
      That'll teach me to assume. I was taught not to do it and sometimes I still make the mistake. :)
jacknews 1y ago
"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.
Apreche 1y ago
I wish I could do this, but it’s not an option when you rent. PTACs have been nothing but trouble.
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago
  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?
  - Apreche 1y ago
    It’s the corporate kind.
oceanplexian 1y ago
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.
- SteveNuts 1y ago
  The part that always makes me chicken out is the electrical, did you have any issues with that part?
  - rootsudo 1y ago
    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.
  - sowbug 1y ago
    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.
    - RandomBacon 1y ago
      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.
petters 1y ago
> 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)
- sethhochberg 1y ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    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).
egorfine 1y ago
> I can install some wifi extension for $1000 Take a look at Sensibo. I have one and I'm pretty happy about it.
- gbil 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/revk/ESP32-Faikin
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  yeah the wifi addons are complete rip offs, they're like $20 in components tops - plenty of people diy their own
- kpozin 1y ago
  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).
YesThatTom2 1y ago
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.
JulianWasTaken 1y ago
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.
- mbreese 1y ago
  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.
ipython 1y ago
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.
- hbarka 1y ago
  Old brownstone apartments probably had poor insulation. Add to it that Brooklyn electricity charges are much higher than the New York average.
  - gametorch 1y ago
    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.
- weaksauce 1y ago
  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.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  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.
- 1y ago
SoftTalker 1y ago
> 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.
- genocidicbunny 1y ago
  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.
  - extra88 1y ago
    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.
    - geetee 1y ago
      It's more like $0.30+ when you account for delivery, which costs more than supply. And then some fees on top of that.
bigbadcity 1y ago
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.
- genocidicbunny 1y ago
  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.
RatchetWerks 1y ago
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 https://www.ratchetwerks.com/heat-pump-mini-split-install
- rjsw 1y ago
  Your link to the Mitsubishi support site doesn't seem correct.
  - RatchetWerks 1y ago
    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
    - rjsw 1y ago
      Did you try connecting to the server? A Google search on the hostname does return entries for Mitsubishi, DNS points to AWS.
      - RatchetWerks 1y ago
        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
        1y ago
yardie 1y ago
> 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.
- lsaferite 1y ago
  Their electricity company might do the inspection as free. Ours does. They even offer grants to deal with some of the issues.
  - sct202 1y ago
    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.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
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
sizzzzlerz 1y ago
It costs next to nothing if you do it like the K-man https://youtu.be/62NyFTAKgOI?si=SQR-FDoq3CF4UvIy https://youtu.be/62NyFTAKgOI?si=SQR-FDoq3CF4UvIy
leeroihe 1y ago
Why on earth would you spend this kind of money on an apt you don't even own?
- genocidicbunny 1y ago
  > We bought this apartment at the end of 2023 First sentence of the Prologue.
medler 1y ago
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.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  You will be able to charge people money for that contractor's phone number.
- crmd 1y ago
  I’m in Park Slope and have a similar use case. Can you share the name of the company you went with?
  - medler 1y ago
    Of course, just send me an email
kalleboo 1y ago
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.
kylehotchkiss 1y ago
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.
lowbloodsugar 1y ago
I control all my Mitsubishi minisplits with sensibo. There’s an official Mitsubishi WiFi box too but it’s like $1000.
owenversteeg 1y ago
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?
- rasz 1y ago
  just NY things
- asadawadia 1y ago
  Honestly! That was my thought too That is so crazy expensive to install and $1000 / month electricity bill what!?
- chrisandchris 1y ago
  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.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
  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.
pepicon 1y ago
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
- sieve 1y ago
  > 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.
- koyote 1y ago
  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.
  - 20after4 1y ago
    Everything and everyone in the US have lost their minds. It's definitely an empire in it's final days.
more_corn 1y ago
Sounds like the previous owners spent a lot of money to do something that wasn’t better than nothing. What a waste.
faitswulff 1y ago
> 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.
masterj 1y ago
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.
- namibj 1y ago
  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.
  - masterj 1y ago
    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!
cavisne 1y ago
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.
- cdtwigg 1y ago
  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.
  - cavisne 1y ago
    I think their complaint was it was falling back to resistive heating for most of winter (so basically a space heater)
vamega 1y ago
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 https://github.com/echavet/MitsubishiCN105ESPHome
adamdoran 1y ago
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.
nielsbot 1y ago
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/ https://www.amana-ptac.com/
selfhosttoday 1y ago
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.
kawfey 1y ago
>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.

112 points by ibobev 1y ago

steveBK123 1y ago

Getting work done in your apartment in NYC always feels like being extorted.

righthand 1y ago
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.
- simonjgreen 1y ago
  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?!
  - Projectiboga 1y ago
    Some locks are much harder to pick.
    - righthand 1y ago
      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.
  - righthand 1y ago
    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.
    - simonjgreen 1y ago
      Ah, apologies misunderstood
- bigbadcity 1y ago
  Drilling the lock is literally what emergency locksmiths do. This isn't a Mission Impossible movie. Bet you don't forget your key now.
  - sejje 1y ago
    Without attempting a pick? Only the grifters.
    - jeroenhd 1y ago
      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.
      - exhilaration 1y ago
        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 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-lawsuit-scams/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-maps-fake-listings-lawsu...
    - bluGill 1y ago
      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.
      - gametorch 1y ago
        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.
silverlake 1y ago
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.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

For anyone wondering, PTAC is an acronym for one of those through-the-wall hotel room AC units.

lsaferite 1y ago
More specifically, Pass-Through Air Conditioner.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditioner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditio...
- grasbergerm 1y ago
  Packaged terminal air conditioner actually, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditioner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_condit...
  - lsaferite 1y ago
    That'll teach me to assume. I was taught not to do it and sometimes I still make the mistake. :)

jacknews 1y ago

"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.

Apreche 1y ago

I wish I could do this, but it’s not an option when you rent. PTACs have been nothing but trouble.

ProllyInfamous 1y ago
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?
- Apreche 1y ago
  It’s the corporate kind.

oceanplexian 1y ago

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.

SteveNuts 1y ago
The part that always makes me chicken out is the electrical, did you have any issues with that part?
- rootsudo 1y ago
  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.
- sowbug 1y ago
  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.
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    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.

petters 1y ago

> 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)

sethhochberg 1y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  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).

egorfine 1y ago

> I can install some wifi extension for $1000 Take a look at Sensibo. I have one and I'm pretty happy about it.

gbil 1y ago
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 https://github.com/revk/ESP32-Faikin
micromacrofoot 1y ago
yeah the wifi addons are complete rip offs, they're like $20 in components tops - plenty of people diy their own
kpozin 1y ago
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).

YesThatTom2 1y ago

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.

JulianWasTaken 1y ago

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.

mbreese 1y ago
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.

ipython 1y ago

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.

hbarka 1y ago
Old brownstone apartments probably had poor insulation. Add to it that Brooklyn electricity charges are much higher than the New York average.
- gametorch 1y ago
  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.
weaksauce 1y ago
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.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
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.
1y ago

SoftTalker 1y ago

> 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.

genocidicbunny 1y ago
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.
- extra88 1y ago
  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.
  - geetee 1y ago
    It's more like $0.30+ when you account for delivery, which costs more than supply. And then some fees on top of that.

bigbadcity 1y ago

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.

genocidicbunny 1y ago
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.

RatchetWerks 1y ago

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 https://www.ratchetwerks.com/heat-pump-mini-split-install

rjsw 1y ago
Your link to the Mitsubishi support site doesn't seem correct.
- RatchetWerks 1y ago
  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
  - rjsw 1y ago
    Did you try connecting to the server? A Google search on the hostname does return entries for Mitsubishi, DNS points to AWS.
    - RatchetWerks 1y ago
      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
      - 1y ago

yardie 1y ago

> 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.

lsaferite 1y ago
Their electricity company might do the inspection as free. Ours does. They even offer grants to deal with some of the issues.
- sct202 1y ago
  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.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

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

sizzzzlerz 1y ago

It costs next to nothing if you do it like the K-man https://youtu.be/62NyFTAKgOI?si=SQR-FDoq3CF4UvIy https://youtu.be/62NyFTAKgOI?si=SQR-FDoq3CF4UvIy

leeroihe 1y ago

Why on earth would you spend this kind of money on an apt you don't even own?

genocidicbunny 1y ago
> We bought this apartment at the end of 2023 First sentence of the Prologue.

medler 1y ago

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.

aidenn0 1y ago
You will be able to charge people money for that contractor's phone number.
crmd 1y ago
I’m in Park Slope and have a similar use case. Can you share the name of the company you went with?
- medler 1y ago
  Of course, just send me an email

kalleboo 1y ago

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.

kylehotchkiss 1y ago

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.

lowbloodsugar 1y ago

I control all my Mitsubishi minisplits with sensibo. There’s an official Mitsubishi WiFi box too but it’s like $1000.

owenversteeg 1y ago

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?

rasz 1y ago
just NY things
asadawadia 1y ago
Honestly! That was my thought too That is so crazy expensive to install and $1000 / month electricity bill what!?
chrisandchris 1y ago
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.
RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
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.

pepicon 1y ago

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

sieve 1y ago
> 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.
koyote 1y ago
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.
- 20after4 1y ago
  Everything and everyone in the US have lost their minds. It's definitely an empire in it's final days.

more_corn 1y ago

Sounds like the previous owners spent a lot of money to do something that wasn’t better than nothing. What a waste.

faitswulff 1y ago

> 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.

masterj 1y ago

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.

namibj 1y ago
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.
- masterj 1y ago
  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!

cavisne 1y ago

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.

cdtwigg 1y ago
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.
- cavisne 1y ago
  I think their complaint was it was falling back to resistive heating for most of winter (so basically a space heater)

vamega 1y ago

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 https://github.com/echavet/MitsubishiCN105ESPHome

adamdoran 1y ago

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.

nielsbot 1y ago

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/ https://www.amana-ptac.com/

selfhosttoday 1y ago

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.

kawfey 1y ago

>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.