Heating and Cooling Installation and Service

The honest answer is that ducted suits fewer homes than it gets sold to. It is the right choice when you want consistent conditions through the whole house, you have the roof or underfloor space for ductwork, and you are prepared to pay both the higher upfront cost and the higher running cost of conditioning space you are not in.

Splits win when your usage is concentrated. If the household spends its evenings in the living area and its nights in two bedrooms, three splits will cost less to buy, far less to run, and give you independent control of each zone. They are also easier to repair, and a failure only takes out one room instead of the entire house.

Multi-head systems sit between the two, running several indoor heads off one outdoor unit. They save external space and tidy up the look of a home with several splits, at the cost of some flexibility, since the heads share a compressor and a fault in it affects all of them.

The most common fault we find in existing installations is a unit that is the wrong capacity. Oversized units short cycle, which means they reach temperature quickly, shut off, and never run long enough to dehumidify or to operate at their efficient part-load range. Undersized units run flat out and still cannot hold temperature on a 40 degree day.

Correct sizing comes from a heat load calculation, which considers room volume rather than floor area, glazing area and orientation, ceiling insulation, wall construction, air leakage, and how many people are typically in the room. A west-facing living room with large windows in Point Cook needs substantially more capacity than an identically sized south-facing room in a well insulated Newport townhouse.

Rules of thumb such as a fixed number of watts per square metre are how the wrong unit gets sold. They ignore every variable that actually matters, and they are the reason so many homes have a unit that struggles in exactly the conditions it was bought for.

Reverse cycle heating delivers 3 to 4 units of heat for every unit of electricity, because it moves heat rather than producing it. Gas heating converts fuel to heat at 80 to 92 percent, and cannot exceed 100 percent by definition. That efficiency gap is the reason electric heating now costs less to run in most Victorian homes despite electricity costing more per unit than gas.

The comparison gets more one-sided if you have solar. Running reverse cycle during daylight hours uses generation you would otherwise export for under 5 cents, rather than importing at 30 to 45 cents or burning gas. Pre-heating or pre-cooling the house before the evening peak is one of the simplest ways to lower a bill.

There is also the gas supply charge. If heating is your last gas appliance, going all electric lets you abolish the connection and stop paying a daily charge regardless of how little gas you use.

A lot of western suburbs homes have gas ducted systems from the 1990s and 2000s reaching end of life. There are three sensible replacement paths and they suit different houses.

Ducted reverse cycle can sometimes reuse existing ductwork, which reduces cost, but only if the ducts are in good condition, correctly sized for airflow and adequately sealed. Old ducting is frequently undersized for refrigerated air and leaking badly into the roof space, in which case reusing it wastes the efficiency you just paid for.

The second path is replacing a whole-house ducted system with a set of splits in the rooms you actually use. It is often cheaper to install and always cheaper to run. The third is a hybrid, retaining evaporative cooling if it exists and adding reverse cycle splits for heating and for the humid days evaporative cannot handle.

Air conditioning is an electrical installation, and this is where a lot of jobs get complicated on the day. A ducted reverse cycle system, or several splits added at once, is a substantial new load on a board that may already be full.

We check the switchboard before quoting, not after. That includes spare ways, main switch and supply capacity, and whether existing circuits are protected correctly. If a switchboard upgrade is needed, it appears on the quote at $800 to $3,500 or more rather than arriving as a variation. Being one contractor for both trades is what makes this straightforward.

Outdoor unit placement also matters more in coastal suburbs. Salt air off the bay in Altona, Seaholme and Williamstown attacks condenser coils and fixings, so placement, mounting hardware and periodic washing all affect how long the unit lasts.

Most air conditioning failures are preventable. Blocked filters, dirty coils, blocked condensate drains and low refrigerant charge account for the large majority of callouts, and every one of them shows up as reduced performance well before it becomes a breakdown.

A system that is not cooling as well as last summer is telling you something. So is one that runs constantly, ices up, drips inside, or trips a breaker. Booking a service in spring rather than during the first 38 degree week is both cheaper and considerably faster.

We service and repair what we install and what we did not, including filter replacement, coil cleaning, drain clearing, electrical fault finding and refrigerant work.