One van, one ladder and a phone that rang mostly in January, in Mayfield in 2014. There are three of us now, installing and servicing air conditioning across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and the Hunter all year.
NSW air conditioning and refrigeration Lic. 000000C (demo)
ARC refrigerant trading authorisation AU00000 (demo)
23Who we are
Three technicians, every one licensed, and one van that comes back for the service. We started on Dewpoint Lane in 2014 and we're still there.
Ring us and one of the three technicians answers. The person who measures your house is the person who installs the unit, and the same van comes back for the service a year later.
Most of our work is in the city suburbs and the inner west: weatherboards and brick terraces where a split system install has to find a sensible wall for the outdoor unit, and 1960s brick homes with enough roof space for ducted air conditioning. Out of the city, we work across Lake Macquarie and Maitland, and give Cessnock and Singleton their own days.
Half of what we do now is looking after units already on the wall: the yearly service and clean, and the repairs that come in on the first hot week of December, when a unit that sat quiet all winter is asked to work hard.
The first job was a terrace in Islington with a box unit rattling in the back window and a baby who wouldn't sleep through a hot night. A small split went on the bedroom wall, the box unit came out, and the window was sealed again by tea time. The owners rang us the next summer for the lounge, and their neighbours rang us the week after.
Sample story · Stillwind Air is a fictional business
23How we work
Every install quote starts with the room sizes, the windows and which way they face. An oversized unit short-cycles and never dries the air; an undersized one runs flat out and still loses on a westerly afternoon.
Installs are quoted free, in writing, with the unit, the pipe run and any extra work on their own lines. If something changes on the day, you approve the new price before we do the extra work.
When an old unit comes out, its refrigerant is recovered into a cylinder by a licensed technician and returned for reprocessing. Venting it is illegal, and it is the step a cheap removal skips.
You see the coil and the filters as we found them and as we left them. If a repair will do, we say so, even when a new unit would be the bigger job.
Schedule
Tap a setting for the detail.
23Licences
Air conditioning and refrigeration is specialist work in NSW, so it needs a contractor licence whatever the job is worth, and the number has to be on anything that advertises it. Handling refrigerant is licensed nationally by the Australian Refrigeration Council. Ask for both numbers before anyone starts, and check the NSW one on the Fair Trading licence register.
23Got a job?
Breakdown call-out: $140 in business hours, $220 after hours and on weekends, including the first half hour. Install quotes are free.
