I bought my first minisplit ~4 years ago since none of the contractors were available in the hot summer. I bought the tools as well (vacuum pump, manifold, pipe cutters, etc.).

It cost me ~650$ total.

The next time I bought a minisplit (3.5kW one), I already had the tools and it cost me only 450$. A proper one meant for use during harsh winter would probably costs a bit more though, at around 1000$.

So I have set up a few of them for my family and friends so far. The units come pre-charged with gas for ~5M of ducts, there is nothing hard to set them up.

I also set up ESP32 controllers so I could attach them to Home Assistant, bypassing any Chinese cloud apps, etc.

In my state they require:

>160 hours of education/vocational training and 2 years’ verifiable experience in the trade

To get the license to install minisplits (two years experience generally means working an apprenticeship).

It's no wonder install costs are so much in the US. And as you've experienced, they're hardly rocket science to install. The 160 hours training would be more than enough, I'm not sure why 2 years experience gets tacked on the end.

Protection racket. They guys doing the installs now would make much less money if just anyone with some tools could start competing with them.

I don't want just anyone with some tools competing with them. This is a machine full of gas that is awful for the environment. And yes, I'm well aware that in developing countries, a lot of installers just vent coolant into the atmosphere during install rather than doing it properly.

Sure, so have them take a week-long course and register with the county and get a license. 160 hours of class and 2 years of apprenticeship means you have to find someone to apprentice _to_, so the incumbents get to gatekeep how many competitors they're willing to have, and limit it to only the people they like.

Thankfully, the training is only required if you're doing the installs for/as a business.

I think in pretty much every state releasing the refrigerant 'requires' a license (if it's not a DIY model).

And in my state, I copy pasted what was required for a 'residential' HVAC license (idk if you meant commercial HVAC or just making money on installs).

Not Montana apparently. They don't even have an HVAC contractor license anymore that I can find.

Exception rather than the rule

100%.

Unless your state is very unusual that is the requirement for installing them for other people as a tradesman. In most states if you are DIY for yourself all you legally need are the electrical permits for the wiring hookup (which for DIY don't require that "apprenticeship").

You also need an EPA 608 Type 2 license, though minisplits have been skirting around that for some time.

Easy to test for, though I'm not sure if you can do it for free like skillcat used to offer.

What will they do if they learn you installed your minisplit yourself?

Nothing because the political optics of doing anything are bad ad the last thing they want is to create a victim that causes people to ask the question why the rules are even written how they are.

Environmental law is the same way. You're mostly (details depend on jurisdiction) not supposed to pave anything without getting permission but if they pushed the issue on everyone who put a pad under their car port the rules would get changed.

They also don't 100% enforce the speed limit either.

There are people on here who live in this fantasy world where all house work is permitted and performed by licensed tradespeople which is... counterfactual.

See the Brazil movie :)

Idk for Americas, but here in rural EU no one would give a fuck. Some will ask for help.

Nothing assumes no issues. If it catches/causes a fire, good luck with insurance

Insurance would still cover this stuff. You sound like you came here from Reddit, where everyone is convinced that if you DIY anything, your insurance is entitled to deny claims.

Your insurance will pay up. Then they will consider terminating your contract. DIY work in your home does not invalidate insurance claims. This is ludicrous claim. You could go read your insurance contract in five minutes and verify.

This kind of thing is right up there with calling dig safe before a project that will be exclusively hand excavated. At some point you're basically just paying to circle jerk it with the other boot lickers in the office or at the cocktail party over how much you paid for no reason just because the rules that will never be enforced say you ought to.

I couldn't believe it either because it seemed so expensive! EU based colleague got a high-ish end japanese unit (purhased and professionally installed with over 20% VAT on parts and labour) for less than that. The devices can be had for 1000 bucks or less.

I figured it had to be because the US devices are very different but they seem to be the same, and the explanation given by the usual automaton suspect was that the climate control business in the US is basically a cartel with highly inflated prices and shady regulations around how they can be sold.

Not sure if the claim is valid, but the price diff is remarkable so there must be some explanation. Usually everything you can buy is cheaper in the US.

> I jumped to the end and saw $2.3k for the mini split and couldn't believe it. I've installed mini splits on two homes and the quotes were always in the $15-25k range for 3-5 head units, so $2.3k for a head + outdoor condenser unit sounded implausible, but then I saw he found a surprisingly good deal:

It doesn’t take long to install a mini-split condenser with a single air handler. Precast pad for the condensing unit, set the condensing unit on the pad (or buy a wall mount if you need to mount it off the ground), run sealtite to the condenser from the disconnect switch and pull in wire, drill two holes for the line sets and one hole for the power/signal cable that runs from the condenser to the air handler, mount the air handler, connect the line sets, plug in the power/signal cable, install and wire the thermostat. Seal the holes with silicone and turn the mini-split on.

It’s less than a day of work, finding a mechanical contractor to install equipment you furnish for $160-175/hr shouldn’t be hard, contractors just like ripping off homeowners because they don’t know any better.

You don’t really even need a mechanical contractor with precharged line sets, just ensure the disconnect switch is off and locked out before touching any line voltage wiring, and make sure you mount anything heavy to studs and not plywood or drywall.

Minisplits install costs are the biggest scam in the US, in Japan installs regularly cost under $1000 (that includes the minisplit!).

They're literally designed to be easy to install, but in the US licensing requirements tend to be insane (in my state it's 2 years apprenticeship experience for their 'easier to get' mini-split license) and HVAC companies make more off whole home systems.

These things are regularly installed DIY by homeowners (illegally most of the time but you know), it doesn't take two years of experience to be able to install these without issue. 2 weeks, or half a dozen installs surely would be more than enough.

Honestly, I would recommend just doing it yourself. Especially if you have a contractor pull in the electrical connection for it. I installed a pre-charged unit in a much more complicated attic setup (condenser mounted to outside wall on second floor, 20' of refrigerant lines run with lots of angles) and the whole thing took 6-8 hours with no experience. Mounting it to a shed where you're basically just cutting a hole in a wall and the indoor unit and outdoor unit are in more or less the same location should be extremely straight forward. The unit cost me less than $1k five years ago and has been running perfectly ever since.

I think the plumbing is by far the hardest part. Electrical is pretty easy. Hard to screw that up.

But if you screw up the refrigerant lines, they will leak over time, and your machines will not only stop cooling and the motor will burn out, but HVAC personnel who are licensed to buy refrigerant and re-charge your lines will refuse to work on DIY lines because they then will incur legal liability.

I installed my own and paid an HVAC company to very my connections were good, and when it came time to release the refrigerant into the lines, the guy told me I had to do it for legal liability reasons.

if someone finds out you did this yourself then can't the city put a lien on your property preventing a sale until you rip everything out and have it re-done by a licensed person? I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..

> I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..

Where? No electrician is inspecting every house that goes up for sale in the US. Sure you can ask an electrician to inspect a house electrical… but that doesn’t bar a house sale anywhere I’ve ever seen.

For the home inspections I've been a "walkthrough witness" to, the "electrical inspection" portion involved the inspector opening the normal access door to the breaker panel levers, and plugging in one of those $5 Home Depot wiring fault detectors into a few random plugs here and there to verify no wiring faults appear.

But they do not remove the panel cover to look inside, nor do they open up any receptacle box anywhere to look at any of the wiring inside. So they wouldn't know (nor discover) if the wiring job was done well or done in a shoddy manner.

Better home inspections will remove breaker panel box or at very minimum use a thermal camera to check if the breakers are all reasonably warm. Usually both. But that still doesn’t really tell you much about whether something is done to code or not.

Barring very obvious problems, I think you're way overestimating how deeply either home inspectors or town/cities are going to be deeply inspecting (especially older) properties and/or permits. My property is over 200 years old and a lot of the work on it has been licensed but there is doubtless a lot that is older.

AFAIK the biggest risk is disclosure. Some states (Oregon for sure) explicitly require the seller to disclose unpermitted work. It's part of the standard forms you fill out with your realtor when making the listing.

They won't stop you from selling the house as-is but some buyers will walk, some will demand you get it permitted, most will at least want a real inspection done. Getting as-built work permitted after the fact will cost 2-3x as much in permit costs than it would have if done properly, and it may require you to remove drywall to expose things for inspection, but as long as it meets code you won't have to rip everything out and have it redone by a licensed person. In most places you can do work on your own house, so it's the lack of permit that needs to be remedied.

Home inspections are pretty normal when you buy a property. I have no idea what work on my >200 year-old house was permitted. While the latest batch was, I'm guessing a great deal wasn't. But I don't actually know. And, if you're buying a >200 year old house, you know that along with a lot of other things.

Inspections are common but mostly just a surface examination. They cannot, for example, inspect electrical wiring. They can recommend you hire an electrical inspector.

I just sold a 120 year old house. “I don’t know” is a valid answer to the disclosure requirement but it better be true.

Or have plausible deniability.

When I've have had some new windows installed a couple of times, the installer tacked on a lead mitigation fee which was fine because they knew there was probably lead paint buried somewhere but I don't actually specifically know about lead paint buried under layers of newer paint and the like and most of the interior has been reworked to a significant degree.

If you personally really care, don't buy an old house. (Also, when I had the latest round of rework after a kitchen fire, my electrician replaced a bunch of remaining knob and tube wiring which probably dated to whenever the house was electrified.)

Yeah you have to be committed to buy an old house. It's fun but can be a lot of work. I was selling the home I grew up in after my mom passed, so getting it sold was my only priority. We ended up not doing anything but refinish some old floors (not because they really needed fixing per se, but because an original doug fir floor in good condition here brings way more in value than it costs to have done). The electrical was a mix of modern and knob & tube. Buyer didn't bat an eye, they knew the score. They also wanted the house so bad they agreed to eat the cost of the sewer line replacement that was basically mandatory (good old terracotta & rotted out cast iron, I wonder what we will think of PVC/ABS/HPDE in a hundred years).

Speaking of lead ... I was surprised we didn't get any pushback from the floor guys on that. Someone had painted parts of the floors, then laid linoleum in the middle, and my mom had a lot of it covered in carpet that was really in rough shape at this point. I couldn't get a positive test on the paint for lead with an inexpensive test kit but I really would be surprised if there wasn't any. But the guys doing the floor didn't even bring it up. And this is work they specialize in, so they deal with a lot of floors this vintage.

>The electrical was a mix of modern and knob & tube. Buyer didn't bat an eye, they knew the score.

That's sort of the key. If you have your eye on a >100 year old home, love on unless you're OK with a lot of what probably comes with that.

> I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house.

In Texas every homeowner is legally entitled to work on their own electrical system without oversight from an electrician.

In the SF Bay Area, I'd bet good money that the vast majority of work like that is unpermitted. When I was adding an EV charging station to my home, I actually paid a (reputable, licensed) electrician and he rolled his eyes hard at me when I asked about permits. He said it would add weeks to the project and double the cost. Without it, it was a three-hour job.

The city isn't in the business of busting doors and issuing citations if you replace kitchen cabinets without a permit. They basically act if someone credibly complains, which is mostly if you're doing some exterior additions / changes that annoy a neighbor.

I mean...what are the odds of that? And if it does happen, it sounds like a hassle, but the overall cost in that scenario probably isn't THAT much higher than having the licensed person do it in the first place?

Sure, if the odds are 50/50, or you go to jail, or the fines are $50k or something, then yeah, do it right from the start.

But if there's a 2% chance of getting caught, getting caught costs you 150%, and not getting caught costs you 10%...the choice is pretty obvious here, isn't it?

Pulling in the electrical connection is actually simpler. So you might as well do that yourself too.

It is, but you'd be surprised at the number of folks who will DIY stuff, but won't DIY anything electrical.

Insurance won't cover it if you're found to have non-code electrical as the source of a fire. Electricians are expensive, but it's worth having one inspect your work to correct/teach you the approved install method.

So you do it according to the code or better. No cheaping out on components, no shoddy work. Insurance won't revive you or your loved cat either.

Ideally yes. For me I found following the code difficult. Then compound that with needing to know the NECA <https://www.necanet.org/topics/codesandstandards/neis/the-st...> + the state codes. It's non-contiguous in the way it's written so you need to know the relevant sections and how to apply them together. Simple things add up; proper color coding of wiring, knowing how much sleeve to leave in at the edge of a box, what cable nuts are appropriate size for the number of wires bonded, size of box needed based on number of wires, how/where boxes can be mounted, space between EMT in bends, what size bus-bar is appropriate and what can share it.

To the first approximation you have to control thermal output of your wiring.

Since it's I^2*R, you have to size your wires according to max sustained current, take into account thermal conductivity of where your wires are placed and keep all contacts tight. Also size circuit breakers according to that max current so they trip before the whole thing catastrophically overheats. Which is a trivial exersize in itself.

Short-to-case and leak current protection (the reason for three-wire systems/PE conductors and differential protection) takes second place. In larger installations there are also considerations about grounding / ground loops, but that usually does not matter for residential.

This is what the most of the code should be about (I never read US ones, but was doing apartments/small homes for like 20 years already).

The rest, as in colors, sleeves and exact connectors used is helpful, but not critical, and if you think that a typical contractor would not botch it up in a most horrible way, well..

Your big assumption is that just because an “electrician” did it doesn’t mean they did it following the relevant code.

I DIY'd two mini splits for $3,000 that cools about 800 sq ft in Texas summers. Fifty year old house with awful insulation. 27,000 BTUs of cooling capacity. And I'd wager 30% less would've gotten me normal wall units, but I bought the new-ish slim ceiling cassettes that recess into the ceiling so you don't see much more than the grill. The big ass boxes that sit on the wall, my wife wasn't having any of that.

one thing about discount DIY mini splits: they're sometimes/often the same model, with a hodge podge of similar but not identical components. it can be very difficult to get a repair person to work on these - they stand a lot to lose if they try to operate on it and make it worse. they really prefer consistency, and - they also seem to harbor a bit of a distaste for diy systems. Actually, I was educated by one serviceperson's opinion and by the end of their complaints, the experience cost more than the cash, injury wise. But I think relaying this, has some value, because I suspect it's common.

HVAC techs are in such high demand, they can charge exorbitant rates to install/service, that its not in their interest to service them, or even install them.

It took me a while to find a company to install a mini split I purchased on my own, and I paid $$ for labor. This was only because I didn't have the time.

That said, mini splits are so cheap (sub $500) that its easier to just purchase a new one than repair.

Really? I paid ~1500eur for a Mitsubishi mini split including installation. Not quite sure why your setup would be so insanely expensive.