Ducted Air Conditioning Prestons

Local knowledge

Ducted in Prestons homes

Ducted in Prestons is designed for the two-storey project home. The upper-floor roof cavity under a low-pitched concrete tiled roof is shallow and hot, so we fit a slimline fan coil, insulated ducting with sealed joints, and a return air grille in the upstairs landing so the system draws from the hottest floor first. Zoning follows how the family lives: upstairs bedrooms on one zone, the downstairs open-plan living and kitchen on another, with the master bedroom or a media room split out as a third or fourth zone in the larger homes. On the 1990s single-storey homes near Prestons Public School the cavity is more forgiving and a standard fan coil with living and bedroom zones does the job.

The driver is roof heat rather than any local geography. A dark tiled roof on an open estate lot with no mature shade absorbs sun from mid-morning, and by the time the family gets home the upstairs ceiling is radiating heat down. We size for that load rather than floor area alone, and we put the condenser at the rear on the shaded side of the house, clear of the sub-metre side setback and the neighbour's window, with the boundary distance measured before we quote. Cold winter mornings on the flat ground toward Hoxton Park make the reverse-cycle heating a real feature, not an afterthought. Running cost is roughly $1–$2 per hour whole-home, and most Prestons families run only the bedroom zone overnight, which is where the savings come from.