Thomas Wilson

 An empty tenancy looks like a saving. No occupants, no comfort complaints, and an obvious place to cut the maintenance spend until someone leases it. That logic produces buildings where the vacant floor is the one with the problems, and where the first thing a prospective tenant notices is a smell. Don't switch everything off and walk away The instinct is to shut the plant down completely. In a humid climate that creates its own problem. A sealed, unconditioned space with no air movement is exactly the environment moisture likes. Mould grows best in damp and poorly ventilated areas , and a closed tenancy through a Brisbane summer is both. The usual answer is a setback rather than a shutdown. Running the system at a reduced schedule or a wider setpoint keeps air moving and moisture under control at a fraction of the occupied cost. Work out what a setback should actually be A setback isn't a number you pick once. It depends on the space and the season. Through th...

 Most people choose an air conditioner by brand and capacity and let the installer decide what the indoor unit looks like. That's usually a wall mounted head, because that's what everyone fits. There are three common indoor unit types for a single room, and they suit different rooms. The choice affects comfort, noise and how the room looks for the next decade. The wall head, and why it's the default A high wall split head mounts near the ceiling and throws air out and across the room. It's the cheapest of the three, the quickest to install and the most widely stocked, which is most of why it's everywhere. It works well in a standard room with a clear wall and decent ceiling height. Cold air falls, so throwing it out high lets it mix on the way down. Where it struggles is a room with no suitable wall, a raked ceiling, or furniture and joinery filling the upper wall space. It's also the most visible of the three, which matters more to some people than ot...

 Replacing plant in an occupied building is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The equipment is straightforward. Doing it while tenants trade, staff work and nobody loses cooling for a week is where projects succeed or go badly. Most of the difficulty is decided before anyone turns up with a crane. Establish what the building does before you touch anything Measure how the building currently performs and record it, because you'll want to prove the upgrade worked. NABERS rates buildings on a six star scale using independent assessors, with ratings audited by government and valid for 12 months, and represents the current operational performance of your building rather than how it was intended to perform . Whether you pursue a formal rating or just keep your own consumption and complaint data, the principle holds. A before figure is what makes the after figure meaningful, and it's impossible to capture retrospectively. Record the complaint volume too. On a ...

 Replacement quotes concentrate on the new system. The old one gets a line at the bottom, if it's mentioned at all, and that's where the surprises live. Removing an air conditioner properly is regulated work with real steps attached. Knowing what those steps are tells you whether a quote is complete and whether the person doing it is the right person. Decide whether you're replacing like for like The cheapest replacement is a new unit of the same capacity in the same position using the same pipework. That's often the right answer and sometimes it isn't. Ask whether the original system was correctly sized, since replacing an undersized unit with another undersized unit just resets the clock on the same complaint. Ask whether the position still suits the room, because layouts change. If the house has been extended, insulated or reglazed since the original install, the load has changed too. Have the room reassessed rather than matching the sticker on the old ...