Air Condition Units
Does anyone know if you can put A/C window units in the parlor floor windows of a landmark brownstone?
Does anyone know if you can put A/C window units in the parlor floor windows of a landmark brownstone?
dibs: really now, crime is up and i have seen many people crawling up to the front parlor window, including myself when putting my window boxes in. better to be safe than sorry. look at all of the people having their phones snatched in broad daylight. anything is possible and why would you want to tempt fate?
The facts are here;
http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/downloads/pdf/pubs/workguide.pdf
Window A/C; ok
Exterior storm windows; approval required
Mr Slim in front; forget it, no way
CMU is right winowless a/c is a last resort, they operate at about half of their rating
No, bkgreene I’m surprised, given your plethora of “green” posts, you’d recommend those. They are 1) very noisy (all the mechanicals are inside the house; 2) much less efficient (because they pump conditioned air from within the envelope out to cool the coils and 3) expensive (8-900 vs 3-500). And you still have to cobble up a reasonably sealed exhaust system in the window…
which looks worse than a regular a/c. Of course, I never understood why people consider window a/cs unacceptable. 2 months. Get over it.
Of course you can put a window air conditioner in. There is no rule against it. In fact, when it comes to landmarking rules, apparently you can have storm windows installed without any filing or permits in a landmarked neighborhood.
What I would suggest though: why not think about one of those small air conditioners that sits on wheels inside the room and has a short flexible tube to a panel that fits in the window? It costs a little more, but there are a number of positives:
–You can remove the panel quickly and shut the window in case of driving rain, when you leave the house for any length of time.
–You don’t have to worry about installing a heavy unit in the window which usually entails getting some big guy or couple of guys to do it.
–You can roll the unit I’m talking about into a closet easily during all those months you won’t need air conditioning. Windows units get very dirty and are a pain to bring into the house to store over winter. And then, if they stay in windows all winter, so much cold air comes in around them and over the gap where the two window sashes no longer meet mid-window, and so much heat radiates out through them and the thin panels on either side of the unit that you might as keep a window open three inches all winter…it can be that bad.
geez, some of those Mr. Slim units look horrible. Not so much the units themselves, but all the refrigerant lines that go thru the wall. I wouldn’t want to have one in front of a nice brownstone.
Could one put a Mr Slim unit in the front garden. They are very fast to install. I see condensers out front of stores on landmarked blocks but haven’t really seen them in residential. I wonder if folks are just really good at hiding them. They would look much nicer and work better than window units.
You can’t put through-the-wall AC units in a landmarked building, but it is perfectly acceptable to install a window unit. The landmark regs are about physically altering a building’s facade, not installing an essentially portable AC unit.
What neighborhood is so unsafe that someone’s not going to be seen crawling through someone’s front parlour window???? My god. Hardly anyone in Bed Stuy has bars on parlour floor windows anymore, at least not around me.
Technically, I think the answer is no. LPC’s rules prohibit anything that makes the facade look different than it did in the 19th century, and they didn’t have air conditioners back then!
As a practical matter, lots of people have air conditioners in the front windows of their landmarked homes. But witchdoctor makes a good point. I’d be sure they were inside of window bars.