Air conditioner disposal in Washington DC

The short answer

No refrigerant fee is added on top. The minimum visit is $75, so a single small window unit at $87 already clears it.

Why DC runs on window units

More of this city cools itself with window air conditioners than the newer buildings suggest. Pre-war apartment houses in Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant were built without ducts. So were most of the rowhouses on Capitol Hill, in Shaw, Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park, and a lot of them still have only partial central air after a century of piecemeal renovation. English basement units almost always run window or portable units.

Add a DC summer -- long, humid, with heat that sits for weeks -- and these machines work hard and die regularly. Which is why the autumn window-unit pile-up is a real seasonal pattern in this city and not in drier ones.

The refrigerant problem

Every item in the list above contains refrigerant in a sealed circuit. That is the entire reason your building's trash room, your municipal collection and the scrap collector on the block all refuse them: refrigerant-bearing equipment goes through a separate recovery stream, and nobody handling ordinary waste wants the liability of a punctured coil.

It is also why you should not cut the lines yourself or let anyone strip the unit for copper on your property. A vented circuit is a problem you have created, on your address.

Booked removal handles the whole thing at the published price. There is no separate refrigerant charge, no evacuation fee and no environmental surcharge.

Getting a window unit out of a DC apartment

The removal is usually easier than the installation was, but there are DC-specific details.

• Weight. A large unit is heavier than it looks and the grip points are bad. Two people, always, and never lean out over a sill above the ground floor.
• Old sash windows. Rowhouse and pre-war apartment sashes are frequently painted shut, weight-and-pulley, and fragile. Get the window open and stable before the crew is on a clock.
• Walk-ups. Fourth-floor Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant buildings with no elevator. No stair charge -- the carry is included.
• The whole-building autumn. If several neighbors are pulling units in the same week, book one visit for several. Two large units together is $109 + $109 = $218; three is $109 + $109 + $109 = $327.

Outdoor condensers and heat pumps

The $115 outdoor unit price covers the condenser or heat pump sitting on a pad or a bracket -- beside a Silver Spring or Falls Church house, in the strip between two Arlington houses, on a rowhouse roof deck or in a Capitol Hill rear yard.

This one has a prerequisite. The refrigerant should be recovered and the unit disconnected by an HVAC contractor before it is removed, and the electrical disconnect switched off and isolated. Most people are already having a contractor install the replacement, so the sequence is natural: the contractor pulls and disconnects, we remove the old unit, on a day that is not the day the new one is being commissioned.

The furnace at $131 works the same way -- disconnected first by whoever is replacing it.

Dehumidifiers, and why this metro has so many

A DC summer is humid and this city is full of below-grade space -- rowhouse cellars, English basements, unfinished basements under Bethesda cape cods and Arlington colonials. Almost every one of those runs a dehumidifier, and they fail on a predictable cycle.

They contain refrigerant too, so they are refused for the same reasons. $77 each, and they are usually already at the bottom of the stair where the crew is going anyway.

A basement clear that includes one -- dehumidifier plus 10 bags of debris -- is $77 + $132 = $209.

The jurisdiction question

If you would rather use a municipal or manufacturer route, it exists in parts of this region, and it differs everywhere. DC, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church and Fairfax each set their own handling for refrigerant-bearing appliances, and incorporated towns inside the Maryland counties add their own. Some utility and retailer programs also collect working units.

Check your own address's current page for what is accepted and when. And check it again if you have moved -- this metro's residents change jurisdictions frequently enough that stale advice is the norm.

Timing it

Two good windows in this climate. Early autumn, when the units come out of the sashes anyway and you may as well not store a dead one over the winter. And late spring, when you discover the unit that worked last September does not now -- that is the week to book, before the first heat wave makes the replacement urgent.

What to avoid is the middle of an August heat spell, not because of price -- there is no seasonal pricing -- but because that is when everyone in the metro is calling an HVAC contractor at once and the sequencing gets difficult.

A typical autumn DC booking: two large window units and a dehumidifier out of a Mount Pleasant walk-up, $109 + $109 + $77 = $295.

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