Ducted Air Conditioning Cabramatta

Local knowledge

Ducted in Cabramatta homes

Ducted in Cabramatta is a house job, mostly in the 1950s and 60s fibro and brick homes through Cabramatta West and the streets away from the centre. Those homes have pitched tiled roofs with a real cavity, a hall manhole and a simple floor plan, so a full-size fan coil and insulated ducting go in without compromise. What makes Cabramatta different is who lives in the house. Three generations under one roof is normal, so we zone by household rather than by front and back: the grandparents' bedrooms as one zone, the kids' rooms as another, the shared living and kitchen as a third, each with its own control, so nobody is paying to cool rooms they are not in and nobody is arguing over one thermostat. A rear extension with a low roof gets a bulkhead duct or its own head.

The condenser sits on the shaded side of the house on a slab off the driveway, kept clear of the granny flat door and window if the back yard has one, because on a 40 degree afternoon it will be working hard for hours and nobody wants that exhaust across their step. Fibro houses without ceiling insulation get the honest advice that adding it will do more for the bill than a bigger unit. Ducted running cost is roughly $1–$2 per hour whole-home, and with the zoning above a Cabramatta household typically runs one or two zones at a time, which is where the saving over a house full of wall units actually comes from. In winter the same system heats an old fibro home on a near-zero night far more cheaply than the plug-in heaters it replaces.