Split System Installation in Belmont

Postwar stock at this scale means original boards are common, and a fair number still have ceramic fuses behind the door rather than circuit breakers. Every indoor head needs its own dedicated circuit and an isolator, and that circuit has to land on protection that meets current standards.

We test the board and the main earth as part of the assessment, then quote the circuit and any board work as separate lines. It is not an upsell, it is the order the work has to happen in, and seeing the two numbers separately is what lets you compare quotes properly.

These houses have 2.4 metre ceilings, which keeps room volumes modest, but weatherboard and early brick veneer walls with little or no bulk insulation lose heat quickly. The ceiling batts, where they exist, have usually compressed to a fraction of their rated thickness.

The practical result is that a 4 by 4 metre Belmont bedroom often wants 3.5kW where the same room in a Waurn Ponds estate house takes 2.5kW. Restoring the ceiling insulation first is the cheapest capacity available and it improves every room in the house rather than one.

Belmont Common sits on the Barwon floodplain and has flooded before, most notably in 1952 and again in 1995. On the low lying streets near the river, mounting a condenser on a ground pad at natural surface level puts expensive equipment in the path of the next event.

The fix is simple and cheap at installation: a raised plinth or a wall bracket that lifts the unit clear, with the isolator mounted above it. Doing that costs very little on the day and is the difference between a wet condenser and a replaced one.

Ducted gas and wall furnaces are everywhere in this housing, and most of them are near the end of their working life. Reverse cycle returns 3 to 4 units of heat per unit of electricity against 80 to 92 percent conversion for gas, which is roughly 28 to 36 cents an hour to heat a room instead of 50 to 72 cents.

For a typical household that is around $200 to $450 a year, and more again if the house can drop the gas connection entirely and lose the daily supply charge. Victorian Energy Upgrades supports this changeover with a discount applied straight to the invoice.

Belmont blocks are 550 to 750 square metres with a driveway down one boundary, so side access is usually there but narrow. That is generally enough room for more than one condenser, which keeps single head systems available where an inner Geelong cottage would force a multi head.

Belmont is about 65km from our Altona workshop. We book Geelong work in planned blocks, give you a nominated week and confirm the day closer to the time. Refrigerant work is under ARC licence and the electrical connection under REC 37223 with a Certificate of Electrical Safety on completion.