Air conditioning installation in Edgware

Why Edgware installs go more smoothly

If you have read the Hampstead page, this one is the mirror image. The interwar suburban housing that makes up most of HA8 was built with the things that make air conditioning straightforward:

Side access. Almost every semi has an alley or side return. That is where the condenser goes: out of sight from the street, close to the kitchen or hallway riser, and far enough from bedroom windows that nobody hears it.

Cavity walls. Core drilling through a cavity gives a neater penetration and a better seal than the solid masonry you get in Victorian stock, and it makes routing decisions less fraught.

Space to work. Driveways, garages and gardens mean equipment can be staged near the property. On a three-day multi-room install, that saves real time.

Fewer planning constraints. Much of Edgware sits outside conservation areas, so a reversible heat-pump system on a rear or side elevation will often proceed under permitted development.

The multi-split question

Most Edgware enquiries start with one room and end up covering three. That is usually the right call, but it changes the design.

A multi-split runs several indoor units from a single outdoor condenser. One external unit instead of three, one set of penetrations, and a tidier result. The trade-off is that the outdoor unit is larger, and all the indoor units share a refrigerant circuit, which means they must all be in cooling or all in heating at any one time. For a family home, that is rarely a practical problem.

Where it does matter is a home office. If someone is working in a south-facing box room that needs cooling while the rest of the house wants heat in October, a separate single split for that room is the better answer, even though it means a second outdoor unit.

I work this out at survey rather than selling the bigger system by default.

What the interwar stock struggles with

It is not all easy. Two things catch people out in HA8:

Loft conversions. A converted loft is usually the hottest room in the house and the hardest to service, because the pipe run from a ground-level condenser is long and the route is rarely direct. It is doable and it is worth doing, but it costs more than the room below it.

Rear extensions with flat roofs. A flat-roofed kitchen extension is often the obvious condenser position, and it is often the wrong one. Roof-mounted units transmit vibration into the room beneath unless they are mounted on properly isolated frames. If your extension is where the unit needs to go, it needs a frame and anti-vibration mounts, not a pair of brackets.

Running costs, in real numbers

At current electricity prices, a 2.5kW split system running flat out costs roughly 60 to 65 pence an hour, and rather less than that in practice because inverter units throttle back once the room reaches temperature. A typical Edgware bedroom used for eight hours a night across a hot fortnight adds a few pounds a week, not tens.

Used for heating in spring and autumn, the same unit generally costs less per unit of heat than direct electric heating, because it moves heat rather than generating it.