Split system air con in North Brisbane

It depends on the room size, the ceiling height, the insulation, how much glass there is and which way the room faces. A west-facing lounge with big windows needs more than a bedroom of the same size.

Undersized and it runs flat out and never gets there; oversized and it short-cycles and costs you more. We measure up and tell you what suits, rather than selling you the biggest one.

Splits are cheaper to buy, cheaper to run one room at a time, and each head is its own system — if one dies the rest of the house is still cool. The trade-off is a head unit on the wall of every room you want done, and an outdoor unit for each one.

Ducted gives you one controller, vents instead of wall units and nothing to look at outside except a single outdoor unit. With zoning you only pay to cool the rooms you are in. It costs more up front and it needs the roof space to do it.

Doing three or more rooms is usually where ducted starts making sense. We will tell you honestly which way we would go in your house.

A standard back-to-back install — indoor head on the wall, outdoor unit straight through the other side — is usually half a day. A couple of heads, a longer pipe run, a two-storey job or a new circuit off the switchboard takes the day.

We give you a start time rather than a window, and we put drop sheets down. When it’s finished we run it up, check the temperatures and show you how the controller works before we leave.

Back-to-back means the outdoor unit sits directly behind the indoor head, on the other side of the same wall. The pipework goes straight through, which is the shortest run and the least labour.

If the outdoor unit has to go around the corner, down the side of the house or up onto a roof, that is extra pipe, extra cable and extra time. It is not hidden — we look at where everything can go before we quote, and the price you get already has your house in it.

Two things are covered, by two different people. The unit itself carries the manufacturer’s warranty — Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic and Gree all publish theirs. You register it with the manufacturer, and we leave you the invoice and model details you need to do that.

Our side is the workmanship: brackets, pipework, electrical connection, drains, commissioning. That carries a 5-year workmanship warranty from us. If something we did lets go, we come back and fix it.

Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic and Gree are the ones we put in most. They are the brands with parts on the shelf in Brisbane and technicians who can get them, which matters more than the badge on the front when something goes wrong in five years.

We are not an authorised dealer for any of them and we do not push one over another. Tell us the room and the budget and we will tell you what we would put in our own place.

Sometimes. A split system needs its own circuit and an isolator, and an older board with no spare ways or no safety switches can’t give it one without work.

This is where a sparky installing your air con beats an air con bloke who has to call one. We check the board as part of quoting the job, and if it needs a circuit or an upgrade that is on the same quote — one crew, one day, one invoice.