How to get rid of an old air conditioner in Milwaukee

The short answer

Flat, published prices. Carry-out from any floor, hauling and disposal included. Minimum per visit is $75.

Which window price applies is decided by the BTU rating on the label, not by how heavy it feels going down the stairs. If you cannot find the label, tell us the room it cooled and we will work it out.

Refrigerant: handled, never a surcharge

Air conditioners, heat pumps and dehumidifiers contain refrigerant. Federal rules require it to be recovered by trained technicians before the unit is processed, rather than simply vented. That is not optional, and it is emphatically not a DIY job — releasing refrigerant is illegal and the coils are under pressure.

What that means for you:

• We handle it. You do not need to find a technician, arrange a certificate, or do anything to the unit beyond unplugging it.
• It is not an extra line on the bill. A large window unit is $109 and that is the whole number. No refrigerant fee, no EPA fee, no environmental surcharge, no "sealed unit" charge. If a quote for an air conditioner grows at the curb, that is a pricing model rather than a regulation.

It is also why an air conditioner is not an ordinary alley item. Refrigerant-containing appliances are handled separately from general household waste across the metro — check your own municipality's collection page for what it accepts and how.

Why Milwaukee basements are full of window units

This city has a very particular relationship with the window air conditioner, and it comes down to the housing stock.

A great deal of Milwaukee's residential building predates central air by half a century — the 1920s bungalows of Jackson Park and Enderis Park, the two-flats of Bay View and Riverwest, the Polish flats of Lincoln Village, the four-squares of Washington Heights. Retrofitting ductwork into a house with a full basement, a finished attic half-story and plaster walls is expensive and disruptive, so a lot of these homes never got it. They got window units instead — often one per bedroom, plus one in the living room.

Then there is the seasonal ritual, which runs in parallel with the storm windows. Units go in around the start of June, when the humidity arrives off the lake. They come out in September or October, before the first hard freeze, because a window unit left in over a Wisconsin winter lets cold straight through the sash and the casing rots.

So every autumn, three or four heavy metal boxes go down into the basement or out to the garage. They are awkward, they are heavy for their size, and once one stops working it does not go back up in June — it just stays down there. Multiply by fifteen years and you have the pile we are usually called about.

The same applies to the dehumidifier, which in a Milwaukee basement runs continuously from May to September and has a working life of a few years. There is nearly always a dead one standing next to the working one.

The outdoor condenser

Where a house did get central air, the condenser sits outside on a pad — usually in the gangway between houses, sometimes at the back near the alley, occasionally on a bracket.

Replacement is the usual reason for removal, and there are two things worth knowing:

• The line set has to be disconnected properly by an HVAC technician, who will recover the refrigerant from the system at the same time. That happens before we come, and it is part of the replacement work your installer is already doing.
• The old unit often gets left on the pad. Installers sometimes take it and sometimes do not, and "we'll get it next time" is how a dead condenser spends two years in a Milwaukee gangway. If yours is still there, it is $115 to have it gone.

On a narrow Milwaukee lot the gangway is frequently too tight for a hand truck, so a condenser gets carried. There is no additional charge for that.

Before we come

• Unplug it and let any residual condensate drain out. Window units hold water in the base pan and it will find your basement floor otherwise.
• Take it out of the window yourself only if it is safe to. A large unit in an upper-flat window is genuinely dangerous to wrestle alone — if it is still in the sash and you are not confident, leave it and tell us at booking. We will take it out.
• Do not attempt to release the refrigerant or cut any lines. Leave the unit sealed.
• Empty the dehumidifier bucket.
• Gather them in one place if you can. Four units carried from four bedrooms takes longer than four units stacked by the basement stairs — though either way the price is the same.

Worked totals

The autumn basement clear-out — three dead window units and the old dehumidifier, all from the basement of a Bay View two-flat:

• Window AC unit (large, 8k+ BTU) — $109
• Window AC units (small), 2 at $87 each — $174
• Dehumidifier — $77

$109 + $174 + $77 = $360.

The central air upgrade — new system going in, old condenser on the pad and two window units now redundant:

• AC condenser / heat pump (outdoor unit) — $115
• Window AC unit (large, 8k+ BTU) — $109
• Window AC unit (small, under 8k BTU) — $87

$115 + $109 + $87 = $311.

If the air conditioners are part of a wider basement or garage clear-out, compare against volume: a quarter truck is $241, a half truck is $431, three-quarters is $587. The online quote runs both comparisons.

Free routes, honestly assessed

• Retailer haul-away. If you are buying a replacement unit, ask about removal of the old one when you order. Free, and only on delivery day.
• Utility and municipal recycling programs. Programs that accept working room air conditioners and refrigerant appliances do exist in the region and their terms change, so check what is currently running rather than what a neighbor remembers. They typically want the unit to be working, and they set their own limits.
• The alley scrapper. Air conditioners have metal in them, so a unit put out by a garage may well disappear. But it is not something you can schedule, and a refrigerant appliance left in an alley outside your municipality's rules is a violation against your address in the meantime.
• Give away a working unit. A functioning window air conditioner in May moves within an hour on any Milwaukee neighborhood group. In October it moves not at all — timing is everything on this one.

Booking

Pick the unit types in the online quote — small window, large window, portable, condenser — and the flat total appears before you book. Tell us if anything is still in a window or still on a pad, and whether it is coming from a basement or an upper flat. Same-day and next-day slots are usually available, and there is no seasonal surcharge, which matters in a city where this stuff comes out of the windows the same month the snow tires go on.

Frequently asked questions