Installing a Mini-Split AC in a Brooklyn Apartment

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).

Your link to the Mitsubishi support site doesn't seem correct.

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.

Old brownstone apartments probably had poor insulation. Add to it that Brooklyn electricity charges are much higher than the New York average.

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.

I just did an 18K BTU mini split in my garage myself with no HVAC background for around $1K and $300 in tools. For a little more capacity this guy paid 30-40x the price.

This article is a perfect example of why I moved out of NYC. Contractors there are more likely to be dishonest, less skilled and more expensive and have insane leverage over rich apartment dwellers who might own a screwdriver but basically have no ability (or permission) to do anything themselves.

Smart, productive people thus have large parts of their lives eaten up dealing with things that are trivial in a large majority of the country because of the density. I decided I’d rather spend my time pursuing my own goals not basic daily comfort.

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.

Also, most of them are shockingly incompetent. It took years to assemble a list of quality service providers. I pay a little more but stuff works now.

Yeah I agree. I accidentally walked out my front door without my keys in my pocket for the first time in my life. I called my property management company who sent over a technician to unlock the door. The management company intentionally does such a poor job that there is no spare key to my apartment. So the technician has to drill the lock. Surprise! The technician only claims they have a lock-drilling skill.

My phone dies and the technician says I have to call a locksmith and pay for it myself. Now I’m in small claims court for $1275 no good reason other than my property management company enabling extortion by a locksmith. All they had to do was hire or train someone into being competent lock driller.

Real estate industry in this city is a toxic grift game. People are very nice here, but these real estate people are the “assholes” in which everyone refers. The whole thing is rotten except for maybe 5% of landlords.

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.