Air conditioner disposal in Seattle

The prices

Minimum visit $95, so a single small window unit at $87 comes to the minimum — which is a good reason to put the dehumidifier and the dead space heater on the same booking. A large window unit and a dehumidifier together are $109 + $77 = $186.

Refrigerant recovery is included in all of these. There is no refrigerant fee and no appliance surcharge.

Why this is suddenly a Seattle problem

For most of this city's history, air conditioning was something other places had. Houses were built without it, flats were let without it, and the handful of genuinely hot days a year were survived with a fan and an open window.

That changed. After the run of severe summer heat the Pacific Northwest has had since 2021, an enormous number of Seattle households bought cooling in a hurry — window units and portable units, mostly, because they could be bought that week and did not require an installer.

The result is a city with a large, ageing population of hastily-bought AC units, and a disposal question that barely existed here a decade ago. Most of those units are now somewhere between five and a few years old, they were the cheapest thing available when everyone was buying at once, and a fair number no longer work.

What nine months of rain does to a stored AC unit

The specific failure mode here, and it is almost universal.

A window unit is used for perhaps three or four weeks a year. For the other eleven months it has to live somewhere, and "somewhere" is usually a covered porch, a balcony, a carport, or the side passage between two houses. In Seattle that is eleven months of damp.

What comes out the following July is corroded at the case seams, with a rusted fan cage and a mold smell that will not clear. It may still run, but it runs badly, and it is pushing damp air into the room it was bought to make comfortable.

So the honest answer for a great many of these units is that they are not worth storing another winter. If it is corroded, if it smells, or if it did not cool properly last summer, the $87 or $109 is better spent than another year of it taking up the porch.

The corollary for the unit you are keeping: store it inside. A cupboard, a wardrobe top, under a bed. Not the balcony.

Window units in flats and older buildings

Two Seattle-specific complications.

Building rules. Many managed buildings — newer towers in South Lake Union, Belltown and Denny Triangle especially, and plenty of older Capitol Hill and First Hill blocks — restrict window units, either for appearance or because of what they do to older sash windows. If yours has been in a window for three summers and the building has changed its policy, it has to come out.

Micro-units. A small flat in the U District or Capitol Hill has one window, and a window unit in it is the difference between sleeping and not. When the lease ends, that unit is not going to the next place — it is a heavy, awkward object with no resale value and no room in the car.

Neither case has a walk-up fee attached. A large window unit is $109 from a third-floor flat with no lift, the same as from a ground-floor one.

Portable units and the hose

Portable ACs — the wheeled floor units with an exhaust hose to a window kit — sold heavily here for the same reason: no installation, no landlord permission, buy it today.

They are $85 to remove, and they come with two things people forget. The window kit panel, which is usually still in a cupboard somewhere, and the condensate tank, which should be emptied before the unit moves. A full tank slopping out onto a hallway floor is an avoidable annoyance.

One note on reuse: a working portable unit in reasonable condition genuinely does rehome here. Post it to a neighborhood group in June rather than in October and it will go. Post it in October and it will sit, get damp, and become a disposal item by spring.

Heat pumps and the switch away from furnaces

The other half of this story is that a lot of Seattle houses are now installing proper systems, and that produces its own removals.

An outdoor condenser or heat pump unit is $115. A furnace is $131. When a house switches from a gas or oil furnace to a heat pump, both of those frequently go at once, and the tank water heater at $131 is often replaced in the same project.

The old furnace and the old outdoor unit together are $131 + $115 = $246.

The thing worth checking in a pre-war house: whether there is an old oil tank still in the basement or buried in the garden. An empty tank is $461 and one still holding oil is $847. It is better to know during the heating project than during a sale.

What not to do with an old AC unit

• Do not put it in a recycling bin or the general waste. Anything containing refrigerant is handled separately, and most municipal bulky programs exclude these units. Check your own city's current page.
• Do not vent or strip it yourself. Refrigerant must be recovered properly, and that handling is already included in the price.
• Do not leave it on the parking strip. It is heavy, it rusts in days here, and if nobody takes it, it becomes a code-enforcement matter with your address attached.
• Do not store the one you are keeping outdoors. That is how a working unit becomes next year's disposal job.

Frequently asked questions