Real job
North Brisbane & Moreton Bay
Old split system swapped for a Mitsubishi Electric
A tired outdoor unit off the deck and a new Mitsubishi Electric on in its place — old gas recovered, old unit and packaging gone with us.
Old houses make you think about it
A weatherboard cottage is a different install to a brick veneer. There is no cavity to hide anything in, the walls are lined boards you do not want to be drilling twice, and whatever you run outside is going to be visible from the yard forever.
So the decision that takes the longest is where the pipe goes. One straight run in white ducting, lined up with a downpipe or a stud line, disappears. The same run wandering diagonally across three boards is the thing you notice every time you walk past.
On the ground, not on the wall
The outdoor unit here sits on feet in the garden bed rather than bracketed to the weatherboards. On an old cottage that is usually the right call: the cladding is not always something you want carrying 40-odd kilos of vibrating steel, and at ground level the unit is easy to clean around and easy to service.
What it needs instead is clearance. Air in the back, out the front, nothing packed against it, and the base high enough that mulch and leaf litter can’t sit against the coil.
The electrical half
Older houses are also where the switchboard conversation happens. A split system wants its own circuit, and a board with ceramic fuses and no safety switch is not somewhere to add one quietly — that gets looked at when we quote, so it is a line on the price rather than a phone call on the morning of the install.
