Mike Cappuccio talks about how long it takes to do a ductless system installation, what a homeowner can do to help, and some things that can affect the timing of the installation.
Hi. My name is Mike Cappuccio, and I’m here today to talk to you about how long does it take to do a ductless air conditioning installation, what a homeowner can possibly do before we come into a home, and then what are some of the things that can affect the timing on the installation.
The first thing I get asked a lot is, “how long does it take to install these units”? On average, it takes about eight hours per indoor unit to install. That’s on a basic wood frame type home, and without a lot of crazy things going on as far as height and things like that, and in a nice accessible area. But you get into the Boston area, you might be doing one indoor, one outdoor unit, drilling through brick, drilling through concrete. That might take two guys one day, and we could move on from there.
The second thing is a two-zone and a three-zone unit. If we’re gonna get into a two-zone unit, that could be two guys, one day, typically, to do a job like that. You get into the three-zones and the four-zones, some days those can take two days, three days depending on the complexity of the installation.
A good rule of thumb is to look at for each indoor unit in your house it’s gonna take eight hours. Depending on how big the crew is. Usually, we don’t like to do more than a two-man crew because sometimes things can get a little confusing on the job site, but two guys, one day, can do two zones. Four zones, that’s usually done in two days and then we move on from there.
Some of the things the homeowners can do to speed up the process of the installation is when we come out to your home, we’re going to take a look at your home and see, okay, you’ve got a big china cabinet over there full of old antique china, and we want to put a unit above the top of that. Well, the china’s going to need to come out. That’s going to need to be removed so we can have clean, clear access to that space. Any obstructions, kid’s toys, things like that in the hallways. We need clean, clear, free access to get where we need to get to.
The other big thing that slows down installations a lot is the basement area. When we’re doing multi-zone units and we’ve got to bring multiple pipes into the basement to a branch box, we’ve got 30 years of storage in the basement at that point and we need free, clear access to the sills, to the outside of the home, to get in. Some things in the basement are going to need to be moved. That’ll be discussed with you at the point of installation before we come out with an installation manager to say, “Hey, this is the stuff that’s going to need to be moved.”
The other thing that slows things down a little bit is electrical panels. Sometimes we can’t get to the electrical panels. They’re in a closet. We need to have the things moved out of the closet to get to the electrical panel. One other thing I didn’t discuss was a lot of times we mount units over the top of a closet or to the side of a closet and we might be bringing pipes into that closet. Those clothes would need to be removed from those closets. We don’t want to get plaster dust and debris on your clothes, so some of those things would need to be moved as well.
Some of the major factors that can influence the timing on the installation is obviously weather — pouring rain, snow storms, things like that can slow things down. Things around the outside of the home that need to get done if we’re looking at maybe moving a bush, or a tree or something where we’d be putting a condensing unit. We’d need to have that removed by a landscaper or something like that. A lot of these things have been put on to the homeowner to do that we really have to have done before we come out to the home, or they’re going to delay the process of the installation.