Heat Pump & Ductless Installation in Bellevue, WA

What it costs in Bellevue — the prices I publish

Bellevue homeowners get quoted by a lot of companies, and most of them will not put a number in front of you until someone is sitting in your living room. Mine are published on my Google Business Profile where anyone can read them without talking to me first. These are the real figures, and every one of them is a “from” price:

American Standard 2-ton heat pump, side discharge, multi-stage

from $11,264

Ameristar 80,000 BTU 80% gas furnace, like-for-like replacement

from $4,865

A/C coil added during a furnace install (makes the system heat-pump ready)

from $1,435

Honeywell S1200 smart thermostat

from $460

Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium

from $259

Air Scrubber UV whole-home purification

from $1,040

Multi-zone ductless

priced at the site visit — head count decides it

You will notice there is no multi-zone ductless number on that list. That is deliberate. A single head in a bonus room and a five-head system running a whole house are not the same job and they are thousands of dollars apart, so a headline price for “ductless” would only ever be honest for one of them.

What a published price cannot know is your house. A crawlspace you cannot stand up in. An electrical panel with no space left in it. Ductwork that was undersized when it went in and has been strangling every system since. Any one of those moves the number, and I would much rather tell you at your kitchen table than discover it on day two.

So there is no starting-at figure that quietly doubles. I look at the house, I write the number, and the number is the number. If you want options you get good, better and best in writing, and I will tell you what the extra money actually buys — which on some jobs is nothing worth having. There is a 5% discount for active military, veterans and first responders, and financing is available.

Ducted, ductless, or both — what I'd put in your house

There are three honest answers and they depend on the house, not on what I would rather sell.

A ducted heat pump. If the ducts are sound and the panel has capacity, this is usually the better system and often the cheaper one per square foot. One unit outside, one inside, heating and cooling from the same equipment, and gas stops being part of your heating bill.

A heat pump and a gas furnace together — dual fuel. The heat pump does the everyday work and the furnace takes the coldest handful of days. It costs more up front because you are buying two pieces of equipment, and it is the right answer more often than people expect.

Both ducted and ductless on one house. More common than it sounds, and particularly common on a house that has been extended. Ducted equipment handles the original part of the building, a head or two handles the addition the ducts never properly reached. It is not a bodge; it is the right tool in each half of the house.

And a fourth answer that costs you nothing: the system you have has another season in it. I will tell you that too. I would rather come and look at it again next August than sell you something you did not need this week.

Heat pump installation in Bellevue

The three things that decide whether it can be done at all

Before equipment, before brand, before price, three things about your house decide what is possible. I check all three at the site visit and you hear the answer before you get a number, not after you have signed.

The electrical panel

A heat pump needs a dedicated circuit and the panel needs room for it. If it does not have room, that is a service upgrade and it is a real cost that belongs in the conversation at the start. This is the single most common reason a quote turns out not to be comparable to the one next to it.

The ductwork

Undersized or leaky ducts throttle a new system no matter what you paid for it, and a heat pump moves more air at lower temperature than the furnace it replaced — so ducts that were adequate before may not be. I would rather fix that than sell you equipment that cannot perform.

Where the outdoor unit can physically sit

It needs clearance, a level pad, a sensible line set run, and somewhere for condensate to go. On a tight lot, or a house where the obvious spot is the patio you actually use, this occasionally decides the whole design.

Will a heat pump actually keep a Bellevue house warm?

Yes. The equipment I install is cold-climate inverter equipment, rated to keep producing heat into negative temperatures. Bellevue does not get there.

The doubt is fair, because it used to be true. Heat pumps from twenty years ago shed most of their output as the outdoor temperature dropped, which is why so many Puget Sound houses ended up with electric strip heat bolted on behind them, and why plenty of people still remember a heat pump as the thing that ran all night and never really warmed the house.

Inverter equipment changed that. The compressor varies its speed instead of banging on and off, so it holds capacity much further down the temperature range and spends most of its life running slowly. Running slowly is what makes it quiet, and it is also what holds the house at one temperature instead of swinging four degrees either side of the setpoint the way a single-stage furnace does.

The Eastside's problem was never extreme cold anyway. It is the length of the season: a long, wet, forty-degree winter where the heat is on for months. That is the exact condition a heat pump is best at and a furnace is worst at, because a furnace only knows full blast and off.

One thing worth asking when you are comparing Bellevue quotes: get the rated heating capacity at 17°F and at 5°F for the specific outdoor unit being proposed. It is printed on the manufacturer's data sheet. A contractor who will not show it to you has told you something useful.

Where the outdoor unit goes — a real job, fifteen minutes north

On a heat pump installation in Kirkland the obvious locations for the outdoor unit would all have eaten into the patio, and the homeowner did not want a condenser dominating the yard. The unit went underneath the deck instead — hidden and protected, but positioned for proper airflow and with service access kept clear, which is the part that makes it a design decision rather than just hiding something.

That is a Kirkland job and I am labelling it as one. I do not have a photographed Bellevue install I can stand behind yet, and putting somebody else's work under a Bellevue heading is the sort of thing this trade does constantly. I would rather lose the enquiry.

Raise the outdoor unit location early rather than late. Where it sits affects the line set run, the condensate route, the electrical, how much of it you can hear from the kitchen window, and whether anyone can service it in eight years without dismantling something. It is a five-minute conversation at the site visit and an expensive one afterwards. Clearances are not negotiable whatever the location: a unit boxed into a tight corner or buried in planting will run harder for its whole life to do the same work.

See the hidden heat pump job in Kirkland

When ductless is the better answer

A house with no usable ductwork, or ductwork that only ever served half the building, is a ductless house. So is the addition, the converted garage and the bonus room over it — the room that has never been the right temperature in either season.

A ductless mini-split is a heat pump. Same outdoor unit, same inverter compressor, same heating and cooling. The only difference is that it feeds slim indoor heads through a line set about three inches across instead of feeding ducts.

Retrofitting ducts into a finished house is not really an HVAC job. It is a carpentry job with an HVAC job at the end of it — dropped ceilings, lost closet depth, patched and repainted drywall — and you pay for all of that before you have paid for a single BTU of heat. Ductless skips the problem rather than solving it.

Where the heads go is a twenty-year decision and it gets settled on install day on far too many jobs. What decides it: where the line set can reach without running across the front of the house, where the condensate can fall to somewhere sensible, how the air throws across the room, and whether there is a wall the furniture is not already against. Directly above where you sit is a mistake people make once.

Ductless mini-splits in Bellevue

What the install actually involves

Most jobs run two to four days.

Before anything — the site visit

I measure the house and run a load calculation. Not square footage off the listing. I look at the panel, the crawlspace, the ducts, where the outdoor unit can go, and how the line set gets there without running across the front of your house.

Day one — the old system out

Old equipment removed and refrigerant recovered properly rather than vented. On most jobs this is also when the sheet-metal transitions get fabricated to fit what is actually there, because what is actually there is never what the catalogue drawing shows.

Day one to two — the new system in

Outdoor unit set on a level pad with proper clearances and vibration isolation. Indoor unit set and connected with the transitions sealed. Line set run, condensate routed somewhere that will still make sense in ten years, and a weatherproof disconnect within sight of the outdoor unit, sized and grounded to code.

Day two to three — vacuum and charge

The refrigerant circuit is pulled down to a deep vacuum and charged to specification. This is the step that decides whether the system runs for twenty years or fails in its third summer.

Last — commissioning and the walk-through

System run, airflow and charge verified, thermostat configured for your specific equipment, and then I show you how to actually use it. Most people never touch half of what they paid for because nobody sat down and explained it.

The step that decides whether the system lasts is the vacuum and the charge, and it is the one nobody watching from the kitchen can evaluate. That is where a refrigeration journeyman's licence stops being a line on a website.

Permits in Bellevue — a different jurisdiction from my Snohomish work

I hold a general contractor's licence as well as a refrigeration journeyman's licence, which means I pull the permit myself instead of subbing it out or quietly leaving it off the quote.

Bellevue is King County, and the mechanical permit goes through the City of Bellevue rather than through Snohomish County the way most of my work does. The fee is set by the city, so it is a real line on your quote and I will have the actual figure for you at the site visit — not a number I guessed on a webpage in August.

Why it matters more than it sounds: an unpermitted install is the thing that surfaces when you sell the house, and unpermitted electrical work is the thing your insurer asks about after a fire. It also means somebody other than me looks at what I did, which is the point.

New construction and major remodels

If you are building or gutting a house in Bellevue, the HVAC decision wants making early, while the walls are still open and the mechanical space is still negotiable. Designed in at that stage it is a straightforward job. Retrofitted afterwards it is the most expensive version of itself.

I am SpacePak certified for small-duct high-velocity systems, and as far as I know I am the only one from where I live through Seattle who holds it. High-velocity moves air through small flexible tubing instead of large rigid trunks, so it fits into a finished ceiling or an old house without dropped soffits and oversized registers. It is genuinely the right answer for some projects and plainly the wrong answer for others, and I will tell you which one you have.

One condition, and it is not negotiable: I only do high-velocity in new construction. I do not retrofit it into finished houses. If someone has offered to, ask them a lot of questions.

I pull permits under my own general contractor's licence and sequence around the other trades rather than expecting them to work around me.

New construction HVAC in Bellevue

Rebates and tax credits — what I'll tell you, and what I won't

I am not putting a rebate figure on this page.

Utility programmes and tax credits change, they have eligibility rules that turn on your exact address and on how your house is heated today, and a number I type in August is worth nothing to you in February. Bellevue makes that worse rather than better: it is a different county and a different utility from most of the area I work in, so a programme that applied to a house I worked on last month may have nothing to do with yours.

What I will do instead is tell you at the site visit what actually applies to your address and what it is worth — including when the answer is nothing — and then you should go and verify it yourself before you plan around it. That is a better use of your money than trusting a webpage, mine included.

The cooling half nobody asks about

Everyone buys a heat pump for the heat. Then July arrives.

A heat pump is an air conditioner that also runs backwards. There is no separate cooling equipment to buy, no second outdoor unit, no extra install, and no second thing to maintain. For most of the houses I work in, the heat pump is the first air conditioning that house has ever had.

If you are replacing a furnace and you are not ready for a heat pump yet, the A/C coil add-on from $1,435 gets the indoor half done now and leaves you ready for an outdoor unit whenever you decide. That is on my published price list for exactly that reason, and it is the move I would make in a house with a healthy furnace and a bad August.

A heat pump job, in the customer's words

Two Google reviews, quoted exactly as they were written:

“We went with ExactAir for our heat pump because Rylan seemed knowledgeable, and gave us a few options/ideas that other HVAC companies hadn't even mentioned. We're very happy with how the install came out and the care Rylan took in the details and getting everything right. Would 100% recommend to anyone considering an HVAC install.”

— Anh H, 19 June 2026

“They installed a variable-speed American Standard heat pump along with a Platinum variable-speed, two-stage American Standard furnace, and the system has been incredible. The comfort level in our home is noticeably better, and the efficiency has exceeded our expectations.”

— Paula Allen, 4 January 2026

Read the rest on Google

Who is actually turning up

Rylan Utter. About six years in the trade, and ExactAir has been mine since November 2024.

I hold a general contractor's licence and a refrigeration journeyman's licence. Installs are the work I care about and the work I am best at — I quote them, I do them, and I am the one you call afterwards if something is not right.

I am open 7am to 8pm, seven days a week, and the number on this page is my cell. When you call at 7:40 on a Sunday evening you get me, not an answering service taking a message for Monday.

Every review on my Google profile is a five-star review. I would like to keep it that way, which is a better guarantee of how your house gets treated than anything else I could write here.

More about how I work

Common questions

Do you actually come out to Bellevue? Yes. I am Everett-based, so I am not going to claim I am five minutes away — but Bellevue is inside the area I serve and I quote and install there.

How long does a heat pump installation take? Two to four days on most houses. How the building is put together decides it, not the size of the equipment.

Do I need new ductwork? Sometimes. Undersized or leaky ducts will throttle a new system no matter what you paid for it. I will tell you which one you are looking at after I have been in the crawlspace, not before.

Will my electrical panel handle it? That is one of the first things I check. If it will not, you hear about it before you get a price, not after you have signed.

Can I keep my gas furnace? Yes. That is a dual-fuel system and it is a good answer for a lot of houses.

Is it noisy? An inverter system spends most of its life at low speed. Where the outdoor unit gets placed matters more than which badge is on it.

Do you do the work yourself? Yes. Every time.

What if the answer is that I don't need a new system? Then that is what I will tell you, and it costs you nothing.