When you are cooling a larger Camberwell home, the decision is rarely which unit to buy. It is which rooms to air condition first, and whether one multi-head or a few single splits is the smarter way to get there. Martin Turnbull has run Smartlec Electrical Solutions since 2017, and he plans a split system installation around how a household actually lives, not how many units fit on the walls. Most families never run every room at once, so cooling every room at once is money spent before it needs to be. Tell us which rooms matter, and a fixed price follows.
Start with the rooms you actually use, not the unit count
A four or five-bedroom home does not need air conditioning on every wall to be comfortable. In practice the living area and the main bedroom carry almost all of the cooling a family wants, with maybe a study or a child's room behind them. So the first conversation is about where you spend the hot evenings, not a catalogue of models.
That also means the plan can be staged. Plenty of households here do the living zone and the main bedroom first, then add a head to a renovated room or a teenager's bedroom a summer later. Because the electrical groundwork is sized for the whole intention from the start, adding the next head later is a simple job rather than a fresh installation. The point is a system shaped to how you use the home, not the most units we can sell you.
One multi-head, or a few single splits?
This is the real fork on a family home, and the answer is rarely the same twice. A single split is one indoor head paired with its own outdoor unit, and it suits a room used on its own, a main bedroom or a self-contained living area. A multi-head runs several indoor heads off one outdoor unit, which keeps a single condenser on the property instead of three or four scattered down the side, and it suits a cluster of rooms cooled across the same part of the day.
Sizing is what makes either one hold the room. Capacity 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, glazing 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 unit suits each room and your budget rather than pushing one we are tied to.
Who installs the cooling, not an aircon firm who subs it out
Here is the part most people do not weigh until something trips. A split system 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 at once asks more of the board than a single head does. On an older Camberwell home the switchboard may be full, or still running fuse-style protection that was never meant to carry it. A dedicated air-conditioning firm fits the unit, then sub-contracts that electrical side out. 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 the same warranty. It is the same reason a renovating household often books the cooling alongside a Camberwell electrician visit, an EV charger installation or a dedicated Camberwell EV charger.
