Air Conditioning Edge Hill

In a Queenslander, the pipe route is the job

Ask most people what an air conditioning install involves and they will describe choosing a unit. In Edge Hill the equipment is the easy part. The genuinely hard question is how a refrigerant line set, a condensate drain and a power cable get from an indoor head to an outdoor unit through a house that has no cavity to hide them in.

Single-skin VJ walls are exactly what they sound like: one layer of boards, no void behind. There is nothing to run a line set through. Here you either find a route through a cupboard, a wardrobe back, a bathroom bulkhead or the roof space, or you run it externally in duct and it is visible.

Being straight about that is part of the quote. On a house like this we will walk you through where the pipes go before you commit, and if the only workable route puts a duct across a front elevation you will hear that from us rather than discover it. Sometimes the answer is a different head location than the one you had in mind, because the room next door has a wardrobe backing onto the right wall.

High ceilings change the numbers

Edge Hill ceilings are frequently three metres or more, and plenty of the houses are high-set with living space raised above ground level. Both matter.

A room that is five by four metres holds fifty per cent more air at a three metre ceiling than at two point four, and the sizing calculation has to use the real volume rather than the floor area. Systems specified off floor area alone are why so many older inner-Cairns homes have a unit that never quite gets there on a bad afternoon.

The other effect is stratification. Warm air collects at the top of a high room, and a head mounted high blows into the layer you care about least. Head position and throw pattern do more work here than in a modern ceiling-height room, and where a ceiling fan is already in place we would keep it and run it alongside the system. Fans and air conditioning are complementary, not alternatives.

For high-set homes the roof space is often usable, which puts ducted genuinely on the table where the ceiling structure and access allow it. It is not always possible, and we will tell you if the void is too shallow to do properly.

Trees, canopy and leaf litter

Edge Hill’s mature canopy is the best thing about the suburb and a mixed blessing for a condenser. Shade over an outdoor unit is worth real efficiency on a hot afternoon. Leaf litter and seed dropping into the coil is not. Units under heavy canopy here need their coils cleared more often than the same unit in an open yard, and a condenser tucked under a poinciana will pack solid with debris if nobody looks at it for two years.

Have a look at the walls with us

Call 0489 266 523 and we will work out the route before anything is ordered.