Air conditioner disposal in Miami

The short answer

Those are complete prices. They include a crew lifting the unit out of the window, off the pad or off the roof deck, carrying it out from any floor, loading and disposal. There is no refrigerant fee, no stair charge, no walk-up fee and no same-day surcharge. The minimum visit is $75.

Why Miami goes through air conditioners faster

Because the machines here never get a winter off.

A unit in a four-season climate runs hard for three or four months and idles for the rest of the year. A unit in Miami runs most days of most months, and on the worst of them it never cycles off at all. Compressors accumulate run hours at roughly double the rate, and they fail correspondingly sooner.

Then there is what the air itself does. Anywhere near the bay or the ocean — Key Biscayne, Surfside, Sunny Isles, the Grove, North Beach, Miami Beach as a whole — salt attacks the condenser coil and the cabinet from the outside in. Fins corrode, fasteners seize, the casing streaks and then perforates. An outdoor unit that would last comfortably inland is on a shorter clock a mile from the water.

And humidity means the equipment is doing two jobs at once. A system here is dehumidifying as much as it is cooling, which is why so many Miami homes also have a standalone dehumidifier in a closet or a garage, and why those fail too. A dehumidifier is $77.

Window units and the older buildings that still use them

Window units are far from gone in this county. They are in the older low-rise apartment stock off Biscayne, in Little Havana and Allapattah duplexes, in North Beach and South Beach walk-ups where central air was never retrofitted, and in the back bedrooms of single-story houses across Hialeah and Westchester where the central system never quite reached.

They are also the item most likely to injure somebody on the way out. A large window unit is heavy, awkward, and normally sitting in an opening two or three storys up with nothing underneath it. People try to take them out alone, lose control at the tipping point and either drop the unit outside or catch it with a shoulder. It is a two-person job with a floor plan, not a solo one.

A small unit under 8,000 BTU is $87; a large one over that is $109. There is no charge for the story it is on, and no charge for a third-floor Art Deco walk-up with no lift.

Outdoor condensers, pads and roof decks

The outdoor half of a split system — the condenser or heat pump sitting on a pad beside the house, on a roof, or on a mechanical deck — is $115.

One thing has to happen before it goes: the refrigerant has to be recovered by a licensed technician, and the electrical supply isolated and disconnected. That is not a junk removal job in any state, and it is not one here. In practice the HVAC contractor doing your replacement handles it as part of the changeout.

What happens far too often in Miami is the second half of that sentence getting skipped. The new system goes in, the installer takes the indoor air handler, and the old condenser stays on the pad because hauling it was never in the quote. It then sits in the side yard rusting for a year, and it is still sitting there when a storm watch goes up and the homeowner discovers that a corroded condenser is not something you want loose beside the house.

Ask your installer directly whether removal of the old outdoor unit is in their price. If the answer is no, $115 is the number, and it does not change because the unit is on a roof or at the back of a narrow side yard.

The condo version

In a tower the equipment is smaller but the logistics are larger.

Units in Brickell, Downtown, Edgewater and along Collins commonly have a packaged unit or an air handler in a mechanical closet, with condensers on a shared deck or the roof. Everything leaving the building goes through the service elevator on a booked window, and the association will want a certificate of insurance naming it on file before a crew is allowed past the desk.

Two things to confirm with management before scheduling: whether roof or mechanical-deck access needs an escort, and whether your window is weekday-only. In season those windows book several days out, and a missed one costs you the week rather than the afternoon.

The price is unaffected by any of it. A condenser is $115 whether it is on a pad in Kendall or a deck twenty storys above Biscayne Boulevard.

Doing it before hurricane season, not during

A dead AC unit is an obvious item on the pre-season list and an easy one to forget, because it is not in the house.

A window unit that has been pulled out and propped on a balcony, a portable unit parked on a screened patio, a stripped condenser leaning against a fence — these are exactly the loose objects the county asks people to clear when a system is in the cone. They are heavy enough to do damage and light enough to move.

Clear them in the spring along with the patio furniture. After a storm the metro's collection capacity is absorbed by vegetative debris for weeks, and a rusted condenser is a poor thing to be chasing a slot for in October.

Combining it with the rest of the visit

Almost nobody books a truck for one unit, and they should not have to.

A garage-corner clear in Hialeah with a large window unit at $109, a dehumidifier at $77 and a chest freezer at $146 is $109 + $77 + $146 = $332.

A pre-season patio and equipment clear with an outdoor condenser at $115, a portable AC at $85 and a propane grill at $71 is $115 + $85 + $71 = $271.

If the list stops being a list, the truck ladder takes over: a quarter truck is $241, a half $431, a full truck $732.

Booking it

Send the unit type and a photograph — for a window unit, one from inside the room showing how it sits in the opening; for a condenser, one showing the pad and the route out.

Tell us if a technician still has to recover the refrigerant, because that has to come first. If you are in a building, send the certificate requirements and the window you have been given. Quotes and crews work in Spanish across the county.

Frequently asked questions