The Cost of Installing a Ductless Heating and Cooling System (Video)

In this video, Mike Cappuccio explains which factors affect the cost of a ductless system. He talks about how the complexity of the home, the existing electrical system, and the type of ductless system can affect the final cost.

Hello, I’m Mike Cappuccio with Jones Services, and I’m here today to talk to you about the cost of a Mitsubishi electric heating and cooling ductless system that you would install into your home and some of the factors that affect those costs. A lot of times when we are out installing these systems in your home, there are a lot of different things that drive the cost up or down.

The first system I’m going to talk about today is the single zone system. That’s where we have one indoor unit and one outdoor unit that go onto the system. Now, the outdoor unit, what we call that is the condenser, that gets placed outside the home. The indoor unit is the wall unit or the floor unit that would go into the home. From there, the cost that will affect that would be how far the indoor unit is being placed from the outdoor unit.

Now for example, if you’re on the first floor and we’re only running 10 feet of refrigerant pipe between the indoor and the outdoor unit, that is going to affect the cost and lower the cost. If the piping is going from the first floor of the home up to the third floor of a home, that is going to affect the costs. So you can see height affects the cost, the line run between the indoor and outdoor units affects the cost.

Now, the next thing that drives some of the cost up when we move into a bigger system. When we move into what’s called our multi-zone systems and we’re putting either two, three, four, or up to eight indoor units on that system, that is actually going to drive the cost up.

For every indoor unit, we’re adding cost to the system and also the complexity of where these indoor units are going to go. If they’re being placed on exterior walls and we’re just basically drilling a hole through the exterior wall and bringing pipe down the side of the house to the outdoor unit, that costs us a little bit less than if we’re mounting the unit on an interior wall and we’re running pipes inside of the walls. Or if we’re running pipes in closets and then having to bring them down into a basement and then bringing them outside, that’s more labor intensive. So the labor side of it and the complexity side of it drive the cost up a little bit.

Now, one of the other things is also the types of indoor units that you’re installing in your home have things to do with the cost. Obviously a typical wall unit that mounts onto a wall is the least expensive of all of the indoor units to install. Now, if we’re going into what’s called our ducted air handlers, and we’re putting a ducted air handler into an attic or into a basement, and now we’re installing all new duct work in your home or in your attic, that is going to drive the cost of the system up as well.

A lot of the cost is affected by the complexity of the homes in the New York area where we work or where we’re installing these systems. Whether we’re in a rural area or if we’re in the suburbs, we have to go up onto roofs and install condensers on roofs or install condensers on ground level. A lot of those things all affect the cost.

The other thing that really can affect the cost of things is when we come into your home and start looking at the electrical side of this. What do we have for electrical to work with? Because you could be adding a small system that might only require a 15 amp breaker, or you might be adding a large system that requires a 50 amp breaker. So we need to look at the available electrical power that is in the home to run the heating and air conditioning system that we’re adding to your home.

For example, if you have a 60 amp service with knob infused type things, whether these old fuses that you had to turn out and screw in and screw out to change the fuse, that’s probably going to need a panel change out because that would be a 60 amp panel. It could be 100 amp, but it’s very outdated and it probably will not be able to handle the existing new system that we’re trying to put into the home.

A lot of times we need to look at the amperage of the home too. Is it 100 amps? Is it 200 amps? Typically, we like to see 200 amps when we’re going to the bigger systems. 100 amps sometimes is fine, but again, these are all things that affect the cost of installing a Mitsubishi heating and cooling system in your home.