LivePutting central air in a prewar apartment There is nothing elegant or charming about an a/c unit jammed into a prewar window.  But the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission prohibits many prewar dwellers from installing thru-wall a/c units into exterior street-facing walls. In many cases, central air conditioning is a more attainable dream:  The often dreary interior airshafts or courtyards commonly found in prewar buildings can make ideal locations to install the thru-wall or window-mounted condenser unit employed in so-called “split system” central air conditioning systems that are the darling of prewar apartment owners and their architects, says Tom Degnan, principal of Degnan Design Group, an architectural design/build firm. The condenser can be installed in the upper section of a window already suffering from an uninspired view. Or it can go through the wall, covered by a flush-mounted grill panel outside and projecting about six inches into the apartment, where it is easily hidden by cabinetry. 

(Apartment owners with roof access may also be able to install a freestanding condenser there.) The condenser directs refrigerant to a fan coil unit (about 20” x 24” x 40”) that can be stood vertically in a closet or hung horizontally from the ceiling inside a soffit (such as in a transition area between two rooms) outfitted with a trap-door for maintenance access.what is the best split unit ac And rather than dropping an entire ceiling to run the ductwork that funnels cool air around the apartment, architects are adept at concealing it inside artfully dropped portions of the ceiling, including beams and spatial transitional areas between loftier rooms.cleaning ac wall unit Most of Degnan’s clients install central air as part of larger renovation project, but it can be done à la carte as well, costing around $30,000-40,000 for a typical two-bedroom apartment.central heating air conditioning units prices

Installation takes only a few weeks. However, you’ll need to submit detailed architectural plans and/or engineering drawings for board approval first and obtain permits from the Department of Buildings.  All told, plan on starting the process several months in advance.Written Not only is it common, it's more common than any other city in the United States to NOT have central air in NEW buildings, including high-end luxury high-rises. A majority of the residential buildings in Manhattan were built before World War II, and you'll find window unit air conditioners dripping water onto pedestrians on everything from beautiful pre-war Co-Op buildings inhabited by billionaires to overcrowded pre-law tenement buildings. Why is Central Air not more common in new luxury developments in New York City, the way it is in the rest of the world's cities?  Stephen Smith explains in this article in New York YIMBY "Death of the PTACs: TF Cornerstone to Give Rentals Gift of Central Air":Money can buy you a lot of things in New York, but a new rental building with central air is not among them.

Unique among North America’s cities, builders in New York have forsaken generations-old technology used in every city from Los Angeles to Toronto, in favor of the lowly packaged terminal air conditioning (or PTAC) unit.Punched through the wall below a building’s windows, PTAC units mar the façades of new rental buildings from the Financial District to Flushing, Boerum Hill to the Bronx. They are found in affordable housing developments and low-end rentals, as well as skyscraping towers in Midtown that charge $3,500 a month for a studio apartment.“They have terrible energy performance, terrible acoustical characteristics and terrible aesthetics,” wrote one architect from a major New York City firm that’s built projects using the units.Why they’re used in the first place is somewhat of a mystery. Simple inertia and the high cost of development in America’s largest city, forcing builders to scrimp and save wherever they can, are the most oft-cited reasons. But there are also regulatory hurdles, from special Department of Buildings permits needed for central air, to height limits that make ducted systems more difficult.

And then there’s a contingent within the city’s insular construction industry that doesn’t even realize how unique our reliance on PTACs really is. (In reality, while they’re fairly common in urban hotels and can occasionally be found in cheap rental projects and older buildings outside of New York, they’re almost never used for new luxury projects.)[There is hope for central air in new buildings in New York City] ...the heat pump alternative to PTACs doesn’t count towards a building’s allowed square footage, since mechanical space is deducted from a building’s floor area for zoning purposes. A heat pump sits on the floor in a corner space, feeding cool air into both the living and bedrooms, whereas a PTAC must cantilever over the floor in every room with climate control and therefore cannot be deducted as mechanical space.PTACs, McMillan said, “are almost as hideous from the inside” as they are on the outside. “They’re really fat and bulky, and they protrude. I kept saying, why can’t anybody improve on this design?

The answer I got was that we only use them in New York, therefore the market is so small that nobody bothers to try to improve them.”The stick of the energy code is one way, but the Department of Buildings should also dangle the carrot of easier compliance with permitting rules for systems other than PTACs and through-wall units. One expediter we spoke to pegged the cost of getting a so-called “equipment use permit,” needed to install central air-scale condensers (but not PTACs), at $7,000 or $8,000. The permit then needs to be renewed annually, something he said rarely happens, with heavy fines levied on those who don’t comply. Another architect told YIMBY that the city’s noise regulations effectively forbid the use of mini-splits – a ductless system somewhere between PTACs and central air, commonly used in Europe and Asia, in which the condenser can be placed on the roof or otherwise out of sight.Rental buildings will always have cheaper finishes and fewer amenities than condos, but skimping on quality air conditioning should not be necessary.

If every other city in North America has managed to find a way to deliver rentals without PTACs – often at a fraction of our rents – New York City can too.There is a mocking twitter account that documents PTACs: PTAC Style (@PTACstyle) | TwitterTake a look at Silver Towers, completed in 2009 by WTC-developer Larry Silverstein, it's 1,359 units in two 60-story towers with a pool and many other amenities. It's over 1 million square feet of development. Take a look at all those horizontally-aligned black rectangles that break up this building's facade on every floor--those are the PTACs.Source: Silver TowersCorrespondingly, many smaller outer-borough buildings are constructed without central air and with through-the-wall bellow-window holes for air conditioners with covers from the Fedders or Friedrich companies.  These buildings, typically built at the low-end of the market have come to be called "Fedders Buildings" [2] [3].Window units are so common here, the last mayor had one installed on his car[4]:Also, it should be noted that 74% of citywide carbon emissions come from buildings and mostly residential buildings [4]:1.

The New York Times 2. The New York Times3. http://www.nyc.gov/html/gbee/dow... via Stephen Miller on TwitterWritten Upvoted by Peter Flom, Written Tyler -Thanks for the awesome details.Questioner -I'd say this is one of the great urban mysteries of NYC, except that Tyler answered it. The situation is PATHETIC regarding air conditioning at every price point and building type in New York, a freaking joke.Like so many other things in New York, the "bubble effect" means that many, many people don't realize that the depravity of the situation is actually uncommon outside of NYC and can be fixed.It's just like the ridiculous joke of the New York supermarkets until a two year period when Fresh Direct, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods all opened up after years of effort and totally against the odds and put half of the old-line scum bugs under that were serving spoiled food in terrible conditions.There is hope New Yorkers!Written Three things [especially in pre-war co-ops] are extremely rare in NYC apartmentsCentral air conditioning [buy your AC unit]Laundry machines [use the common basement machines]Dishwashers [wash your own dishes, or eat out :)]Written