Ductless Mini-Split Installation in Everett, WA

How many heads does a house actually need?

This decides the price, and it cannot be answered over the phone. A head does not serve a room, it serves a volume of air that can circulate. An open-plan downstairs with a stair opening is often a single head. Three bedrooms down a hallway with the doors shut at night is three, because a head in the hallway heats the hallway and nothing else.

That is why the range is so wide. One head for the bonus room over the garage that has never been the right temperature is a different job, by thousands of dollars, from five heads on one outdoor unit in a house that has never had central anything. Anyone who quotes you a ductless number before they have walked the house has not asked enough questions yet.

The question worth asking before you sign rather than after: is the outdoor unit being sized with room to add a head later? Staging a job is sensible — solve the two rooms that are genuinely a problem now, add the third next year — but only if the outdoor unit was chosen on day one to accept it. If it was not, adding later means buying the outdoor unit twice.

Ductless, small-duct high-velocity, or retrofit ducts?

There are three honest ways to heat and cool a house that has no usable ductwork, and ductless is only one of them. Which one wins depends on the house, so here is how I choose between them.

Ductless suits houses where a handful of specific rooms need solving, where wall space is available for the heads, and where you would rather not lose ceiling height. It is the least invasive of the three by a wide margin and usually the fastest to install.

Small-duct high-velocity — SpacePak — suits houses where you want the comfort to be invisible. It uses flexible small-bore supply tubing that snakes through existing wall and floor cavities to compact round outlets, so there are no wall-mounted heads to look at and no dropped ceilings to build. It is the right call in period houses where a wall-mounted head in the front room is not acceptable. It is a system I install and am set up for, which is not true of most contractors quoting you ductless.

Retrofitting conventional ducts into a finished house is not really an HVAC job at all — it is a carpentry job with an HVAC job at the end of it. Dropped ceilings, lost closet depth, patched and repainted drywall, all paid for before a single BTU of heat. In a house with plaster walls and no attic to work in, that carpentry can cost more than the equipment it exists to serve. Sometimes it is still right. Usually it is not.

And the counterweight that matters more than any of the above: if your house already has sound ductwork, a ducted heat pump is normally the better system. It is out of sight, everything filters through one filter, and it costs less per square foot of house. If someone recommends ductless without looking in your crawlspace first, they have not answered the question — they have quoted the thing that was already in the van.

What does a ductless mini-split cost in Everett?

There is no headline ductless price on my published list, and that is deliberate rather than evasive. Head count decides the number, and head count is decided by your house.

What is published, on my Google Business Profile where anyone can read it without talking to me first, are the figures that do not move: a 2-ton American Standard heat pump from $11,264, and the mechanical permit at $250 for the Snohomish County jurisdictions where most of my work sits. Those are real from-prices, not a range invented for a webpage.

What no published price can know is your house. A crawlspace you cannot stand up in, an electrical panel with no room left in it, or a line set that has to run three times its normal length because the only place the outdoor unit can physically sit is round the far side of the building — any one of those moves the number. I would rather tell you that at your kitchen table than discover it on day two.

There is a 5% discount for active military, veterans and first responders, and financing is available.

Will a mini-split keep the house warm in a Puget Sound winter?

Yes. The equipment I install is cold-climate inverter equipment, rated to keep producing usable heat well below freezing. Everett does not get near the bottom of that range.

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 exactly why so many Puget Sound houses ended up with electric strip heat bolted on behind them, quietly costing a fortune every January.

Inverter compressors changed that. The compressor varies its speed instead of banging fully on and fully off, so it holds capacity much further down the temperature range and spends most of its working life running slowly. Running slowly is also what makes it quiet — which matters more in a mini-split than in a ducted system, because the indoor head is in the room with you rather than down in a crawlspace.

One thing worth doing when you compare ductless quotes: ask for 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 heads go is a twenty-year decision

Head placement gets settled on install morning on a lot of jobs, and that is far too late for it to be a considered decision. A head on the wrong wall is something you look at every day for twenty years.

What actually decides it: where the line set can reach without running across the front of the house, where the condensate can fall to somewhere sensible without a pump, how the air throws across the room, and whether there is a wall the furniture is not already against. High on an outside wall above a window is common, because it throws air the full length of the room. Directly above where you sit is a mistake people make exactly once.

The outside of the house matters as much as the inside. Line-hide should run straight and tight to the building rather than looping across the siding, and penetrations get properly sealed rather than foamed and forgotten. On a multi-zone job the branch box belongs somewhere reachable with its ports labelled, because at some point someone who is not me is going to open that wall.

What the installation actually involves

Most ductless jobs run two to four days. Head count and how the building is put together decide that, not the size of the equipment.

It starts with a site visit where I measure the house and run a load calculation rather than reading square footage off the listing, and where I look at the panel, the crawlspace, where the outdoor unit can physically go, and how the line set gets there. Then heads and line sets, then the outdoor unit set level on a pad with vibration isolation, proper clearances, condensate routed somewhere that still makes sense in ten years, and a weatherproof disconnect within sight of the unit, sized and grounded to code.

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. The refrigerant circuit is pulled down to a deep vacuum and charged to specification. That is where a refrigeration journeyman's licence stops being a line on a website and starts being the reason the system is still running in its twentieth summer rather than failing in its third.

Last is commissioning and the walk-through — system run, airflow and charge verified, controls 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.

Permits, and why they matter more on this job than they sound

I hold a general contractor's licence as well as a refrigeration journeyman's licence, which means I pull the mechanical permit myself instead of subbing it out or quietly leaving it off the quote. In the Snohomish County jurisdictions where most of my work sits, that permit is $250 and it is on my published price list rather than appearing as a surprise on your invoice.

Why it matters: 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. A ductless job is electrical work as well as mechanical work — there is a new circuit and a disconnect involved. It also means somebody other than me looks at what I did, which is rather the point.

Servicing mini-splits that are already in

I repair and maintain existing ductless systems of every brand, not only the ones I installed.

The job that gets skipped is cleaning the indoor coil and the blower wheel. A mini-split head has no filter cabinet standing between it and the room — just a thin mesh screen — so over several years the blower wheel loads up with a felt of dust and the coil behind it does the same. That is what causes the sour smell people blame on the drain, and it quietly costs airflow and efficiency long before it ever causes a fault. It is not a filter change; the head has to come apart properly to do it.

A five-zone job, in the customer's words

This is a Google review, quoted exactly as it was written:

“I am extremely satisfied with ExactAir. Most other companies have expensive quotes and used high pressure sales tactics. Rylan was able to immediately set himself apart with genuine conversation and upfront expectations and pricing.”

“Rylan installed a 5-zone minisplit in our 1930s home. He is the real deal; extremely passionate, knowledgeable, and most importantly, he cares. The system is sized appropriately for our home, and the installation work looks fantastic! I cannot recommend him enough. You will not be disappointed.”

— Alex Gebhart, 4 July 2026

Who is actually turning up

ExactAir Home Comfort is one person: me, Rylan Utter, based in Everett. The person who quotes your job is the person who does the work, and there is no commissioned salesman in between taking a percentage of the system you end up with.

I am reachable 7am to 8pm, seven days a week, and the number on this page is my cell rather than a call centre.