So, how much does air conditioning cost to install?
Short answer: we don't know yet, and neither does anyone quoting you a figure straight off a website. The honest answer depends on your room, your wall and how far a pipe has to run, so here's what actually moves it, and why we'd rather ring you than guess.
Nearly every air conditioning site you find will show you a number somewhere on the page. Most of them are wrong for your house: padded to cover whatever job could possibly turn up, or picked to look competitive rather than accurate. We'd rather explain what changes the figure, then find out your actual answers on the phone.
What actually moves the number
- The room
- A sun-trap living room and a shaded home office are both "one room", but they ask completely different things of a machine. That difference alone moves the number more than anything else on this page.
- The wall
- Picture the wall you would want it on. If the other side of it is outside, the run is short and straight. If it backs onto another room, the pipe has further to travel to get out of the house.
- The pipe run
- How far the outdoor box ends up from the indoor unit changes how much pipe, bracket and labour the job needs, whatever wall you start from.
- One room, or more than one
- Doing a second room while the van and the tools are already on site costs far less per room than us coming back separately another day. Worth flagging even as a maybe.
- Access
- Ground floor with a clear run outside is straightforward. A third-floor flat, an awkward angle, or nowhere obvious to route a cable takes longer and needs more kit.
- The machine
- Mitsubishi Electric, LG and Daikin all make units at different specifications, and the right one for a loft office is not always the right one for a nursery.
Before you weigh it up
You are not buying it for a fortnight
Most people think they are buying something for the summer. What we fit runs both ways: it pulls heat out of a room in July and pulls it in through February, so the machine you bought for a hot fortnight is the one warming the room at Christmas.
In the rooms it serves it can do the job the radiators were doing, and a lot of people end up leaving the heating off in those rooms entirely. It will not heat your water, so a boiler or cylinder still has the taps and the shower — worth knowing before anybody promises you it replaces everything.
It runs on electricity rather than gas, so it gets cleaner every year the grid does, and because it moves heat instead of making it, it does more with each unit it uses than an electric heater ever could.
Why there is no figure on this page
Every competitor ranking for that question online publishes a padded figure that is wrong for most readers. We would rather ask you a handful of quick questions and be right, then ring you with the number that is actually yours.
Answer five quick questions, we’ll ring you with your real price
We’ll ring you back within two hours.Mon to Sat, 10am to 6pm. Outside those hours, first thing the next working day.