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Narrow lots, no ductwork, a wall furnace, and a building that was not expecting to be cooled.
Most of these houses cannot take a ducted system
Victorian and Edwardian houses on this island were built with a floor or wall furnace and nothing else. There is no attic worth the name, no crawlspace route that does not run somewhere awkward, and no way to put a duct system in without losing a cupboard in every room and dropping a ceiling somewhere you will mind.
That is not a problem to solve with determination. It is a constraint, and a ductless system sized per room is the honest answer rather than the compromise — it costs less than the ducted job that would have damaged the house, and it works better in a building with this much variation between rooms.
We will tell you which kind of house you have on the first visit, because everything after that depends on it.
Six things
No heat
The majority of our winter calls. Wall and floor furnaces included, serviced honestly and condemned only when they genuinely warrant it.
Ductless
Sized per room rather than per house, with the outdoor unit placed where the gap, the windows and the neighbour have all been considered.
Line-set routing
Grouped, covered and run where nobody has to look at it. On a house this close to the next one, the covers are what people notice.
Condensate
Where the water goes from a wall unit, and whether it ends up on somebody else’s path. On a narrow lot this is a neighbour question as much as a plumbing one.
Isolation
Mounts and pads where vibration is the issue rather than sound. Fitted at installation, because retrofitting them means taking the unit off.
Ventilation
Bathroom and kitchen extract that actually terminates outside the building rather than into a roof space — the commonest fault we find in this housing stock.
Three things worth knowing
Cooling loads are small
This island rarely gets truly hot and the marine air keeps it moderate. That means the right system is smaller than people arriving from inland expect, and an oversized one will leave a house cool and damp rather than comfortable.
Old materials want care
In a house of this age, anything that involves cutting, scraping or removing old material wants identifying first. We will stop and say so rather than work through it, and testing and removal are licensed activities that are not ours.
The salt air is real but mild
Estuary rather than open ocean. Equipment here corrodes faster than inland and far slower than on an exposed coast. It changes the maintenance interval a little and it is not a reason to buy an expensive package.
We will not install something that will start an argument
If the only place a unit can go is directly under a neighbour’s bedroom window, we will say so before you order it rather than after they knock on the door. Sometimes there is another position. Sometimes there is a different piece of equipment. Occasionally the honest answer is that a particular room cannot be served the way you wanted.
That conversation costs us jobs and saves customers years of a bad relationship with somebody they cannot avoid. The signature page works through it properly.