Strip out the cabinet and a box of fittings and what remains is a day of skilled labour with a shape to it. This page shows the entries that lengthen that day, the ones that feel expensive and change nothing, and the three shapes a day takes on the compact older stock around the downtown square and the mid-century neighbourhoods that surround it. No dollar figures appear anywhere, on purpose.
Furnace Direct prices licensed recovery ventilator work across North St. Paul, and never sells the hardware on its own. The reason to read a ledger rather than a headline figure is that it lets you interrogate any quote you receive, ours included, entry by entry.
Heat recovery and energy recovery install identically. The cabinets differ, but the routing, the penetrations, the tie-in, and the balancing — which is where the hours live — do not care which media is inside. Choosing the technology your house needs will not cost you a longer day.
Provided it vents safely and the blower is sound, its age is irrelevant to this work. If we find a combustion-venting problem we will tell you and price it visibly on its own, never folded quietly into a ventilation quote.
This is an indoor job with two holes in a wall. Small city lots near the square and larger parcels on the edge of town produce the same ledger, as long as a ladder can be set safely on the elevation we need.
A dramatic winter story and a mild one take the same number of hours to solve. Diagnosis shapes which core goes in the cabinet; it does not add labour to hanging it.
Crew arrives in the morning, commissioning and the walkthrough happen in the afternoon, and everybody is finished before the light goes.
Still one day, but a full one. This is the most common shape on mid-century stock in this part of the east side and it is the shape most quotes here are written against.
Day one is rough-in and the openings; day two is trim, commissioning, and the patch. We would far rather book the second morning up front than surprise you with it at four in the afternoon.
Within a few blocks of each other sit compact older houses with short runs and open basements, and mid-century splits with finished lower levels and no ceiling access anywhere useful. Between those two the day roughly doubles. Any figure we advertised would be either a bait for the easy house or a deterrent for the hard one, with an asterisk underneath doing the actual work. The commitment we can make instead is procedural: look at your photographs, tell you which entries are in play, write one number, and stand behind it.
Ledger makes sense? Send four photographs and we will count your hours.
Request a counted quoteA flat number is only trustworthy when both parties know its edges. Five kinds of work sit outside ours and always have. Rebuilding a home's heating distribution is a project in its own right. Shifting a water line or a gas line out of the path is another trade's afternoon. Cutting into structure to create a chase where none exists is a third. A combustion-venting fault found once the house is running balanced is a safety repair and gets treated as one. And finishing work beyond closing up the holes our own crew made belongs to whoever is painting the room. When any of these turn up, they appear as separate lines with separate numbers before a tool comes out — never absorbed quietly into a total, and never introduced halfway through a Tuesday.
People send us pictures and forget the number that actually drives the ledger. Walk a tape from wherever the cabinet would hang to the nearest outside wall you would be happy to see two hoods on, and tell us that distance and whether the path crosses anything finished. That single figure moves the estimate more than anything else you could send. After that, images help: the mechanical room wide enough to show what is already crowding it, the open panel, and the elevation those hoods would land on. With a distance and three pictures we can usually commit to a number rather than a range.
Because the spread between the short day and the two-day is wide enough that any single published figure would be a lie to somebody. It would either undersell the difficult house or frighten off the easy one. What this page can do honestly is show you what the number is counting, so that when two quotes differ you can ask which ledger entries each one assumed rather than guessing at who is cheaper.
There is a difference in the cabinet itself and it is modest compared with what the routing entries can swing. Nothing in the labour changes. It is worth saying plainly because a surprising number of people talk themselves into the wrong technology believing they are saving a meaningful amount, and they are mostly saving less than the difference between a short day and a long one.
Typically the wall assembly and the removal entries. Older stock around the square has been worked on repeatedly, so there is often something in the way that nobody remembers installing, and the exterior walls are frequently not the simple lap-sided assembly the newer neighbourhoods offer. The duct route, on the other hand, is often short, because these houses are compact.
Usually not. A measured distance from the cabinet location to the nearest workable outside wall, plus a few clear images of the mechanical room, the panel and that elevation, gets us to a figure we will hold in most houses. Where something stays genuinely uncertain we name the entry it affects instead of inflating the whole quote to cover ourselves, and we tell you what would settle it.
Five things, listed in full further up this page: rebuilding existing heating distribution, relocating plumbing or gas out of the way, cutting structure for a new chase, repairing combustion venting, and finish work past closing our own openings. They are excluded because none of them can be judged from a driveway, not because we hope you will not notice. Each becomes its own visible line if your house turns out to need it.
Usually it moves a short day to a long one, occasionally to a two-day if the ceiling has no access anywhere along the route. It is the entry most worth photographing before you ask for a number, because it is the one that most often turns a confident quote into a revised one.
The distance from the cabinet to the nearest workable wall, which entries you think apply, and anything already tied into the return. One counted number comes back.
Nothing on these sibling pages is about money — they work through the heat-versus-energy question itself, by elimination, by provenance, and by failure mode.