Ducted Air Conditioning in Lavington

Replacing evaporative with evaporative

This is the more common Lavington job, and it is often the smarter spend. If the ducting in your roof space is sound, correctly sized and reasonably insulated, a new evaporative unit connects to what is already there, and you are looking at a single day on site rather than a multi-day retrofit.

What we look at first is whether the original install was actually right. A surprising number of Lavington systems have been underperforming since day one — an undersized unit, or outlets positioned so the air short-circuits back out of the room it entered rather than sweeping through the house. Replacing like-for-like without correcting that just buys you the same disappointment with a newer badge on it, so we assess the outlet layout as well as the unit.

Pad choice is worth deciding rather than defaulting. Rigid media pads cost more up front than aspen, last considerably longer and generally cool better, which usually makes them the better value across the life of the system.

When a changeover makes sense here

The changeover case is strongest when the system consistently disappoints during heatwaves rather than simply being old. Evaporative depends on how much moisture the air can still absorb, so on a humid forty-degree afternoon the air arriving at the outlets can feel warm and damp. If that is the experience driving your enquiry, servicing or replacing the evaporative unit will not fix it, because it is a limit of the technology rather than a fault.

Most Lavington jobs are single-storey brick veneer homes on a standard block, with an evaporative unit on a tiled roof and ducting run through a reasonably accessible roof space. That accessibility is good news either way — it keeps labour down and lets us properly inspect what is up there before quoting rather than pricing on assumptions.

The ductwork question

For a like-for-like evaporative replacement, existing ducting can usually be retained where it is in decent order, because the new unit is asking it to do the same job.

A changeover is different. Evaporative systems move a large volume of air at low pressure, so the ducting is frequently a larger diameter and lighter grade than a refrigerated system wants, and the outlet positions follow a different logic — evaporative pushes air in and lets it escape through open windows, while refrigerated needs a sealed house and a proper return path. In practice we can often retain part of the roof-space layout and some of the runs, then replace outlets, add a return, and swap out any duct that will not perform. On older Lavington installs where the ducting has been up there for decades, full replacement is sometimes the more honest recommendation, and we will say so.

Sizing for the western sun

A lot of Lavington's housing stock has large west-facing living areas and modest eaves, which means a genuine afternoon heat load in January. Undersizing is the most common mistake we are asked to fix, in both system types — a machine that copes in November and gives up in the second week of a heatwave. We size on the actual house rather than a rule of thumb, and on refrigerated systems, where the load is concentrated in one part of the home, zoning usually earns its cost back quickly.