23Working in Lake Macquarie
Lake Macquarie is twice the size of Sydney Harbour and open to the sea, so its eastern side lives in salt air and its western side runs hotter, and one rule for the whole city fits neither.
Lake Macquarie covers about 110 square kilometres and runs 24 km from end to end, and it's the largest coastal saltwater lake in the Southern Hemisphere. It meets the Tasman Sea through the Swansea Channel. Captain William Reid sailed into it in July 1800 looking for coal, took the entrance for the mouth of the Hunter River, and the lake was called Reid's Mistake until it was renamed for Governor Macquarie in 1826. Cockle Creek and Dora Creek are the main streams feeding it. The City of Lake Macquarie had 213,845 residents at the 2021 census, spread across 92 suburbs and about 648 square kilometres, with council based at Speers Point and roughly 32 km of ocean coastline on the eastern edge. That shape gives the city two climates. The eastern shore takes the sea breeze and the salt that comes with it. The western shore sits back from the ocean, and the Bureau's Cooranbong station records hotter summer afternoons and colder winter nights than Newcastle Nobbys on the coast.
The northern end and the eastern shore
The top of the lake, around Speers Point and Warners Bay, is closest to our workshop and has the widest mix of work: townhouses near the foreshore, family homes, newer streets in Lakelands and a strip of gyms and showrooms on Hillsborough Road. Salt off the water still reaches the outdoor units closest to the shore.
Down the eastern shore it gets harder on equipment. Belmont sits on a narrow strip of land with Belmont Bay on one side and Nine Mile Beach on the other, so salt arrives from both directions depending on the wind. Units there get coated coils where the model offers them, stainless fixings and a fresh water rinse on every service.
The western side
Around Toronto, Wangi Wangi and Morisset the work changes. The ocean is further away, so salt matters less, but summers run hotter and winters colder than on the coast. Systems out here work hard in January and July, so we size the heating side as carefully as the cooling side. Morisset is the furthest of our regular lake towns, so planned jobs there are grouped onto set days with Dora Creek, Bonnells Bay and Cooranbong.
Booking from anywhere on the lake
When you ring, tell us the suburb first. It tells us which day a planned job can go on, and for a breakdown it tells us which technician is closest. The quote visit for a new system is free on every side of the lake, and any new wiring back to the switchboard is done by a licensed electrician we book, before we connect the unit.