On a larger Brighton home the real decision is rarely which brand of unit to buy. It is whether to put in ducted refrigerated cooling through the whole house, or a multi-head split that cools the rooms you actually live in for a good deal less. Martin Turnbull, a licensed A-Grade electrician who has run Smartlec since 2017, talks that choice through before quoting either, because on a big Bayside home it moves the cost more than the model does.
Whole-Home Ducted or Multi-Head Split?
A four or five-bedroom Brighton home runs into this first, and it is worth answering properly rather than defaulting to the bigger system. Ducted refrigerated cooling pushes cool air through ceiling ducts to every room off one large outdoor unit. On the right home it is excellent: one controller, vents that disappear into the ceiling, even cooling everywhere at once. It also costs the most to install, needs ceiling and roof space for the ducts, and cools rooms you may rarely sit in.
A multi-head split is the other route, and on a lot of Brighton homes the better-value one. Several indoor heads run off a single outdoor unit, each on its own thermostat, so the living area, the main bedroom and a study are cooled independently and the spare rooms left out of it. You pay for the rooms you use, zoned one by one, and keep one condenser on the property instead of a row. Ducted still wins where a home genuinely wants every room cooled together, or where ceiling vents matter more than running cost. Most households land on the split, because they never run the whole house at once, and cooling rooms nobody is in is money spent before it needs to be.
Sizing the heads, and which brands we fit
Whichever way you go, getting the capacity right is what makes a system hold the room instead of running flat out and never quite getting there. It is measured in kilowatts and matched to the space, so a bedroom might want a 2.5kW head, an average living area something in the 5kW to 6kW range, and a wide open-plan zone more again. Ceiling height, the big areas of glass a lot of Bayside homes carry, and afternoon sun all shift the figure, which is why we size against your actual rooms rather than a chart. We fit the names you will recognise, Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric and Fujitsu among them, and tell you which suits each room and your budget rather than pushing one we are tied to.
The electrical half a split needs, and one trade who does it
Here is the part most people do not weigh until something trips. A split is not just a head bolted to a wall. Each one wants its own dedicated circuit back to the switchboard, and a multi-head pulling for several rooms asks more of the board than a single head does. A larger Brighton home is often already running a pool pump, ducted heating, electric cooking and maybe a car charger off the one board, so there may be no room or protection left for the cooling. A dedicated air-conditioning firm fits the unit, then sub-contracts that electrical side to whoever is free. Smartlec works the other way around.
Martin is an A-Grade electrician first, also licensed to install split systems, so the circuit, the switchboard check and the unit go in as one job under one licence. If the board needs attention before the heads can go on, that is the same quote and warranty, not a second contractor to chase.
