Ducted Air Conditioning Lurnea

Local knowledge

Ducted in Lurnea homes

Ducted is the exception rather than the rule in Lurnea, and we say so honestly. The original 1950s–60s fibro cottages have a shallow roof cavity, sometimes under a tin roof with barely enough room for a person to crawl, and forcing a fan coil in there means a compromised install that struggles on a hot day. For those homes a split or a multi-head is the better spend. Ducted comes into its own on the 1960s brick veneer homes and the bigger blocks toward Mount Pritchard, where a pitched tiled roof leaves room for a compact fan coil and rigid ducting, zoned as living and bedrooms. On a house that has been extended at the back we design the duct runs around the extension roof, which is often a lower skillion that needs its own approach.

Where ducted does go in, the climate does the rest of the design. These homes are exposed on open flat streets with no sea breeze and little shade, so we size for a real 40°C load and put the condenser on the southern or eastern wall where it stays out of the afternoon sun. Insulation in the ceiling is often missing or thin, and we will tell you if adding it before the install would make the system cheaper to run. Cold winter mornings mean the reverse-cycle heating gets used as much as the cooling. Running cost is roughly $1–$2 per hour whole-home, and for a household watching the power bill the zoning matters most: run the bedroom zone alone at night and the living zone in the afternoon, never the whole house all day.