Central heating in NZ homes has been a rare luxury in the past. However we are noticing a rise in installations for not only new home builders looking for whole home heating and cooling solutions but people are renovating and incorporating new central heating units in their renovated or refurbished homes. Central heating can be effective situated both underfloor or in-ceiling, and have very little noise or noticeable air movement.
Beware of the ‘heating and cooling’ advertising that some central heating manufacturers are placing on their products. We recently had one client who asked us to fit air conditioning to their home after finding that their natural gas heating and “cooling” unit did not cool, other than bringing fresh (warm) air in from outside and circulate that through the house. The unit had no cooling ability – being a ‘boiler’, and yet still had a ‘cooling’ label on it. The heating worked fine, so we selected the air conditioner and its location to function primarily for its cooling ability – which was a Mitsubishi Electric ceiling cassette unit fitted to the top floor ceiling.