Anybody have experience installing in-wall air conditioners?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve got an ancient window unit which serves me well, but annoys The Building because we’re not supposed to have them. It’s one of those buildings with Fedders boxes and we’re supposed to get 240v A/C units to go into those things. So being a responsible apartment owner I will do my duty and get one, lest they send me another angry letter.

But I’ve been looking at the inside of this Fedders box in my living room. It’s got a big piece of sheet metal now, almost flush with the wall, which will obviously have to be removed in order to put the AC in the box. However, I can’t figure out how to get it off. It is connected to the box’s metal frame with some weird fasteners. If nobody knows what I’m talking about, I’ll take a picture tonight when I get home.

Anyway, has anyone installed this type of AC before? How to I get the front of that box off? And is the installation particularly more difficult than “slide AC into box, and plug it in?”

Thanks.

2

I can tell you that the “Fedders box” is properly called a “wall sleeve” - smal difference, but if you have to call Fedders or someone else for help, you’ll sound just that much more like you know what’s going on.

If you can get us a pic of the fasteners, there’s enough of us here that can recognize weird screwheads that we can tell you what you need. Strangely, their instructions make it sound like the blank panel is just held in with a few ordinary Phillips-head screws.

Also, a caution on what to buy - there are at least three sizes of these wall sleeves. Presumably, the building people can tell you which model air conditioner fits, since they had the sleeves installed. IT would be something like an A-series, B-series, U-series, etc.

Once you have the cover panels (inside and outside) off, it’s pretty much just screw in the outside louver/trim panel, slide in the unit, affix the inside trim, plug it in and enjoy.

3

Thanks, gotpasswords. I don’t really remember what the fasteners look like (other than they were weird) so I will take a photo with my extremely fancy digital camera tonight.

4

I have the wall sleeve air conditioners.

It can be hard to find an AC unit to fit the sleeves. LG has a good selection and they are designed with some tolerance to sleeve sizes.

I mention this because the management in my building always insisted that Fedder’s was the only company that made the AC units that fit, but my HVAC guy found and installed the LG units with no problems

5

Well, I know I promised awesome hi-res digital pictures, but I can’t seem to find my camera’s USB cable. Feh. I wanted to get a SD card reader, anyway.

For now, a description will have to suffice:

Imagine a shoe box, with the top turned over and shrunken slightly so that the little short walls of the top fit inside the box. The inside cover of the sleeve is oriented like the shoe box top, and the fasteners connect it to each wall of the sleeve. The fasteners themselves appear to have a hexagonal nut head, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the head of the fastener or just a nut on a shaft that projects from the outer sleeve.

Come to think of it, it’s probably the head of the fastener, since it wouldn’t make sense to have shafts sticking out into the space where the A/C is going to go. So maybe a plain old nut-driver will work. No room for a wrench to fit.

6

It is entirely possible that the new unit will slide into the old wall sleeve. Unless you want to, or have to, I wouldn’t remove the old sleeve until I confirmed the new unit won’t slide in the old sleeve.

7

I’m not planning to remove the sleeve itself, just the inside cover which prevents me from putting an air conditioner in there.

8

I’m wondering how hard it could be to remove? It’s a sheet of metal covering the sleeve, fastened into place with some type of screw or nut and bolt assembly, right?

Take yourself a pic of the nut or screw head and take it to your local hardware store to get the proper tool to remove it.

Are you going to also have to buy a new ac to fit, or is the apt building going to provide you with one?

I suppose I’m failing to understand the difficulty of the problem.

9

The problem doesn’t seem very difficult at all, which is why I’m asking for advice before I attempt it. I learned that lesson the hard way.

I am going to have to acquire the A/C unit myself, since I’m not a renter. Hooray for homeownership.

10

So you own the apartment but yet are not allowed to use the type of ac you want? What is this, some type of aesthetic issue (everyone else has the fedders box ac, so you must too)?

11

Yep. The window units are ugly so they must go. I really don’t mind since I was planning on getting a new one anyway. The current one is from about the 1630s and has been on its last legs for a hundred years or so.