Heating & Cooling

In our old house we had gas ducted heating and evaporative cooling. We felt that the ducted heating tended to dry the air (newer internal unit) and the evaporative cooling (albeit an old unit) did exactly the opposite, putting too much moisture into the air. Like most of the other items in the house I spent considerable time looking online and asking people about their preferred option. Here's just a few of the points I'd gleaned;

- Melbourne's cooler climate relies more heavily on heating, therefore gas ducted is the default option
- Reverse cycle AC can be expensive to run if done incorrectly
- Using larger 3 phase multi zone units can be more economical to run
- Mitsubishi commercial are good units
- Daikin or Actron Air are generally the two options at the higher end of the market
- The controller boards in the Daikin are expensive to replace
- Actron Air use Copeland scroll digital compressors (from Emerson USA) and are made in Australia (source: Whirlpool)
- The scroll technology provides variable capacity output from 10% to 100%
- The external module can be noisy, so don't place it near bedrooms
- The internal module is big, so along with the ducting it needs significant space under the house or in the roof
- The ESP Plus system uses variable fan speed technology and can significantly reduce energy consumption

Source: Actron Air

We chose the Actron Air ESP Plus SRD 230C 3 phase 23kw heat/cool model