For those who have the experience of building a house already, then this post may not be related and you may have already the experience. However if this is the first time that you are building a house, I can only say then I hope my experience can give you some insights to your building process.
You may have heard from a lot of people and in my case, that the builder charges a margin on any price that they quote to you. Metricon state clearly in their contract that we signed, there will be about 25% margin on any job or fittings that we ask them to do or to supply.
In theory, I understand the reason why they do this and they do need to make profit out of the job as well. I don't have any problem with this economic concept and accept the contract as it is.
How does this relate to getting the ducted air conditioning unit from Metricon.
We were recommended by our sales consultant to go with Metricon to install our ducted air conditioning unit. So that's what we did, we include the air conditioning as an item in our tender documentation with the price of $12,950. For that price, we are getting the top of the range air cond product, Daikin, so there is nothing wrong with the product.
I called a number of company like Frost Air; Actron Air; Blue Star Air Conditioning and some few others but these guys provided some of the cheapest quote all round. However out of the three only Frost Air and Actron Air can work of the plan whilst Blue Star Air Conditioning still need to inspect your place before they can provide you with a formal quote.
In my request, I've asked them to provide me with two quotes. One quote with only providing the air cond unit plus the installation and another quote with the whole lot like installing the ducting, the air cond unit and installation of the unit.
The cheapest quote that I got was from Frost Air and we are getting Fujitsu as the unit. The price with only providing the unit was $11,500 and with the whole works it was $14,000, which was actually more than what Metricon had charge.
Buying only the unit mean only providing the unit. It also still mean that your place need to come pre-ducted in order for them to fit in the unit. Getting Metricon to do the pre-ducted work would cost us $4,000. Which means if you add that to the price of the unit, it will end up costing a lot more.
I guess you can pretty much sums up that we ended up going with Metricon to install the air cond unit for us.
This however maybe different if you are building a single storey house. In single storey house:
- you don't need to worry about the ducting going through between the first floor and the ground floor;
- if there is enough space/void in between the walls; or
- the height of the cavity between the first to the second level.
- price would also be relatively cheaper than two storey house.
You need to take all that into account when making your decision to go external for your air cond. Unless of course you are going old school and install the wall mounted split air conditioner system, then all of the above doesn't really relate much.
So there you go, another argument to go single storey or double storey and which one is cheaper to have a ducted air conditioning system..
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