Infinite Variations (on Heat Pump Installs)

So. Many. Edge. Cases.

Okay, I gotta hand it to ‘em. You know how contractors always tell you

Hey, every house is different.

as a way of telling you that you can’t truly compare quotes? As annoyed as I am by that from a pricing comparison standpoint, I think there’s some truth to it.

But damn. After a year, I can say that there really are A LOT of differences between individual installations out there. This article will list out a bunch of them.

Baseline

I said I was running the Laminar Collective 2025 Spring Deal like an academic hospital, so you bet I’m publishing this. Here’s where we’re starting at: a complete menu of all the main configurations for heat pump installations, and some common complexity adders we run into.

It’s a good starting point. I think this applies really well to the 2 most standard types of home designs out there:

1. Triple Deckers

2. Single Family Colonial Homes

Long story short, the more like a box with flat sides the house looks like, the easier it is to deal with. And the more space you have in your basement and attic, the better.

But of course, you’ll find a lot of homes that aren’t like that.

Variation #1: Complex Line Runs

I’m talking about

• Victorians with exterior soffits that impedes vertical line runs

• 2-families & single families with sloped roofs

• Homes that have had an addition (or two)

• Cape house with small bedrooms & small attics

• Houses on a slope where it may be difficult to mount a condenser

• Multifamily buildings (condos, apartments)

I think you can generally classify all of these as “complexity adders”, but where the complexity adder is hard to pin down is precisely how these impact line runs. Or, in other words: construction problems.

For example, how would you get past this (substantial) soffit/fascia between the 2nd & 3rd floor to get to the 3rd floor rooms?

What about places like this 3rd floor room?

Or, even better: how do you get to this room?

For those 3rd floors under a sloped roof: do you even try to run a line all the way up to the top? Maybe you should just use one of these window unit heat pumps?

In other cases, it’s ductwork. We’ve seen a house with a pre-existing high velocity duct system that was in pretty good condition. Do you reuse it? What if it’s not sized properly for a heat pump?

Variation #2: Partial vs. Whole Home, Thermostats

Okay, so maybe it’s way easier to just put one of those window heat pumps, or even these window ACs, up on the 3rd floor room because you mostly wanted AC anyway. We’ve seen that save around ~$6,000.

Or maybe:

• You just replaced your furnace/boiler

• You moved into a new house and the previous owners installed a new boiler

• You mostly wanted AC in the first place

• You live in a place that’s so big, you just want to do a partial installation because doing heat pumps for the whole place is out of your budget

Okay, cool. Not a problems. Now we dive into partial integrations. The interesting thing is: depending on the brand of heat pump you’re working with, the thermostat that they come with, and the number of zones in the existing house, you’re either going to have a really easy or difficult time doing this.

Consider, for example, that some brands have just released a brand new thermostat:

And that others haven’t really touched their thermostat in a while:

And others with mini-splits that already have built-in SmartThings integration straight out of the box:

Which one do you pick? Of course, that’s on top of considerations for which room a homeowner would actually like to have cooled, and you can make the argument that if there’s good enough airflow, maybe a single mini-split can cover a fairly substantial space.

Variation #3: ERVs & Non-Wall Unit Equipment

So the standard wall unit is fairly easy to install, but sometimes, you’ll want to install a ceiling cassette instead of a wall unit.

A very nicely installed ceiling cassette.

So the thing about ceiling cassettes is that they’re supposed to hang from the top via. suspension bolts:

This seems fine, but what if you’re planning on finishing the attic and you want to install ceiling cassettes on the 2nd floor ceiling, directly below the attic? Do you end up doing something like this?

Now.. you’re potentially doing carpentry work.

If the attic wasn’t being finished, then ductwork comes into play. Do you go with ductwork? Do you go with mini-splits? Will mini-splits be oversized? Do you prefer 1 ducted zone with a heated bathroom, or individually zoned rooms instead?

Also, what if there are no attics? What if you’re dealing with a cathedral/vaulted ceiling type of situation? Then there would be no attic space to do any of that work.

Credit to this photo goes to This Old House & iStock.

And finally, I’ll just leave the ERV stretch code portion here:

Hey, it’s nice to have good ventilation. People do ask for it.

Variation #4: Custom Ductwork & Seasonality

What if your ductwork is way too small for the amount of airflow that has to move with a heat pump? What if it’s just super old? What if it was badly designed in the first place?

Given how different existing ductwork configurations can be in homes, we decided that we can’t scope this out¹. It it listed as custom on our pricing menu.

Let’s also consider the summer.

Long Beach over here, by Gloucester, is really nice during the summer. An attic is not. In fact, installation techs probably hate being in the attic during the summer, so there’s likely a pricing premium based on that.

And that’s extra-true for attics without sufficient spacing.

Variation #5: Gut Renovations

So the complexity here is primarily timing. You need to coordinate with other contractors to ensure that you’re not showing up too early, or too late. This is easier with a skilled general contractor who keep things moving along schedule, but this is not always the case.

Almost by definition, if someone is gutting a place, there’s endless possibilities for what they’re looking to do with the place. (Ideally, there’s an architectural blueprint of what the new space looks like.)

One challenge associated with this is figuring out the heat load of particular spaces if those spaces don’t exist yet. You can’t scan a 2nd floor addition if the addition doesn’t exist yet. You’ll have to do it via. blueprint.

That kind of makes design a bit more difficult to consider.

BONUS (10/14 update): if you are removing a lot of equipment (from, say, a basement that you are gut renovating), the removal portion itself needs to be coordinated. May get difficult if we’re talking about oil tank + boiler + pipes + plaster, etc. It’s hard!

Variation #6: Extra Large Houses

Every once in a while, we get a huge, ~3,000 sq ft. house. This significantly impacts the equipment pricing, which we adjust for in the ductless / ducted world, but with mixed systems (e.g. ducted in the attic & 2nd floor, mini-splits below) we don’t quite have that adjustment yet. For other contractors, this may mean that you’re designing with 2 condensers in mind, instead of just 1. This could mean using light commercial equipment, vs. light residential.

So is a price menu meaningless?

No, I don’t think so. I think the price menu is still pretty useful as a baseline. It forces us to justify why prices are higher than this baseline, in ways that actually makes sense to people.

Still, I think I struggle to reckon with the inherently custom nature of a majority of the houses that we run into. It is a major reason why bulk deals aren’t unlocking as much efficiency as I hoped they would. Even if I lined up 10 jobs for houses without existing ductwork, that could easily give me

1. A colonial SFH who wants ductwork on the 2nd floor

2. A triple decker who wants only ductless wall units

3. A colonial SFH that wants ceiling cassettes b/c they’ll finish the attic

4. Someone going through an extensive renovation before moving into a house

5. A duplex that has a sloped rooftop & difficult line run to the 3rd floor

6. A Victorian that requires careful thought about how to get past the soffits

7. A single family home that wants a partial install in half of their house

8. A more modern home w/big windows that has a different heat load profile

9. A house with vaulted ceilings and therefore no attic space

10. A colonial SFH home that needs a panel upgrade & an ERV + ductwork

This is, I admit, an uncomfortable amount of variation. One of my hopes for organizing bulk deals is that it would allow contractors to approach projects like an assembly line, and then pass on the efficiency savings onto consumers.

But ultimately, it is the sales/comfort advisor/design step that makes sense of exactly what you’re dealing with, and as much as I hate to admit it, this step is labor intensive (as anyone who has done case work/customer service knows) and it makes sense that they should be paid for it.

Does this mean we should overpay for quotes?

No. I think a fundamental problem of this industry is that it is very difficult, for the average homeowner, to tell apart

1. A contractor who legitimately spends a lot of time and money on good design

2. A contractor who just talks about good design but is actually just a salesperson making a quick buck

You can sort of get a sense which bucket they fall into if you start asking them technical questions (such as the ones from below), but realistically, most homeowners aren’t going to do nearly enough research to do that.

In the meantime, we’ll just try our best to help vet affordable contractors in the market.

How can we reduce the cost of this?

We’ll have the answer to that by the end of the spring. Stay tuned!

1. I think the broader case here is pricing in uncertainty. This applies a lot, I think, to multifamily specifically. And if contractors feel a bit uncertain about things, they typically tend to bake in a safety margin in case something goes wrong.