Mike Cappuccio explains the cost of installing a ductless heating and cooling system, including the installation costs for different types of homes.
Good afternoon, I’m Mike Cappuccio. I’m here today to talk to you about the cost of a ductless heating and cooling system in the Boston area. Well, a lot of factors go into the cost, as we all know. A lot of this is based on the complexity of your home, what type of home you live in, and where you live.
Examples, if you live in Boston and you live in a row-home type environment, and you might live on the third floor and you might have two condos above you or two apartments above you, and we’re installing a ductless system in your home at that point, yes, we might have to put a condenser on the roof at that point. We might have to get cranes to put the condenser onto the roof.
We then have to run electrical to the roof. We have to make holes in your roof. We have to have roofers involved. When we start having more trades involved in doing the installation well, the costs go up at that point. First is if you lived in the suburbs and you lived in a one-story home and we were just installing a unit on an exterior wall and just going outside with the piping versus going up to the 6th floor of a brownstone roof at that point, a lot of those things affect the cost when we look at that.
Also, the other thing that affects the cost is, how many indoor units am I installing in the house? What am I doing in the house? Where am I putting these indoor units in the house? Are they all on exterior walls? Are they on interior walls? Are we running piping and drains down into the basement of a home versus just running outside? Those are some of the complexities that go into the installation when we come out to look at that.
When we start looking at the multiple zone units, when we get into the four to eight zone units, I mean, those jobs start to get complex. We have to really come out to your home, look at the complexity of the installation, see what needs to be done, and then we price from there.
A lot of this pricing is based on the complexity and how long the line runs are and how hard or how easy are these lines to get outside. Same thing when we look at a one zone unit, when we have one indoor and one outdoor unit. What is this? How easy is it to do? How hard is it to do?
Again, that’s why a lot of the factors go into the cost with this. The other big factor that goes into the cost of this, too, is hey, do I need to do any electrical work? Is my electrical panel big enough to handle the additional air conditioning load that I’m going to put into my home? When we look at that, do you have a fuse or do you have knob fuses? Do you have round fuses that we’re turning taking in and taking out? Chances are that could be a 60 amp or 100 amp panel. We might need a bigger electrical panel at that point. Electrical costs start to become a factor at that point.
We have to look at all of these factors when we come out to your home to determine what the cost is, but at the end of the day by installing a Mitsubishi zone comfort system into your home, I can tell you, you’re going to have an energy savings. We are going to be doing zoning in your home. We’re going to be installing multiple units and multiple rooms if you do a multi-zone type system and just the zoning alone, I mean, would you turn on eight lights in your home and walk out of all those rooms? No, your father would yell at you if you did that.
Do you turn on one water faucet to get water out of four? No, but when we install a central air-conditioning system we look at that and we install that and you have one thermostat that controls maybe eight zones — might be eight rooms in the house that you’re doing that with. With a zone comfort solution from Mitsubishi Electric, we basically turn rooms off, turn rooms on, that’s how you gain the energy efficiency.
Yes, the Mitsubishi Ductless system is probably going to cost a little bit more than a central air-conditioning system, but what I have seen in the long run is you’re going to save 40% to 60% on your air-conditioning bills in the summertime.
