Actron Ducted Air Conditioning

New to this forum.


We are considering installing a ducted whole of house air conditioning in regional Qld about 2 hrs from Brisbane.

Actron has been recommended to us (3 phase, which we have to our property) and just wanted to know if any forum member have had experience with this make and what your thoughts are?

We had a ducted system (Mitsubishi) in our previos house for 17 years and it gave us good service.

Do a search on the forum, lots of happy and cool people with both single phase and 3 phase Actron air ducted systems.

Actron are one of the best systems availible

Just noticed your post (sorry, a bit slow). We had our Actron ducted installed during construction which we moved into July 2012. 3 phase power, 2 storey, 5 bed, 2sitting rms. Works well (usually run at abt 24c) my wife thinks it a bit cool. Must confess we don't use it that much being near Sydney. Also have solar power which defrays the cost of running somewhat.

Have heard nothing but praise from Actron systems which is why we're putting one in the new build we're about to start.

In Victoria near Melbourne, and got to say, actron add on air con 17kw, with solar works magnificently, easy cools most of my house, use 3 of 4 zones and electric bills comes in around 350 for 3 months, house without garage of 37sq.

Ive had ours now running in a new house for 2 years. It works ok probably could have worked better but the installers ballsed up a fair bit overall though I'm happy with the unit so far. only complaint when the scroll compressor starts its friggen loud to the point where you will annoy your neighbours if your on a small block apart from that great unit

We have a large 3 phase unit with the in room controllers, happy with the unit but still had a few problems but fixed no problem under warranty, the 3 way valve on the outdoor unit failed, I have a reoccurring problem for past 3 years where the controller set to cool but the sensor in the room say heat and hot air not cool air comes out. They replaced the master controller everytime and on the last time they thought the cable from the indoor unit to the outdoor unit was spliced and this was causing problems. Very happy with the individual controllers etc

Can any Fridgies please private message me. My ducted A/C is leaking refrigerant I beleive I advised the installer after we moved in and told them to come prepared to find a leak. They turned up with ancient gear sprayed lube and just looked for bubbles. The outdoor unit has oil staining down the side and its coming from the larger pipe im pretty sure. Anyway they checked it all with their guages and it was reading correct amount of refrigerant this was when the unit was pretty new. They wiped everything up and left. I dont use the a/c that much only during cold spell and hot spells anyway been using it a fair bit over winter and the side of the unit has the oil staining again. I pulled back the rubber hose over the pipes and its literally dripping with the oily stuff. It looks slightly blackish/honey like and is def oil greasy feeling. Im thinking they will come out and find nothing as they dead set spent about an hour spraying stuff over the pipe finding nothing. The only thing I can think of is the oily stuff is the left over crap from them spraying the pipe but that was over a year ago and its literally dripping plus they wiped it all down. I can take a movie or photos of it.

Should I be demanding they come back out and check it and what is a modern day leak detector called.
Last time the tech and the office didnt seem at all concerned and just advised if it is leaking refrigerant you wont blow your compressor up as it will shut itself down when it detects low refrigerant...... ( im doubtful on this ( it probably is suppose to but what if that fails? ) Really annoyed as im sure its leaking and i guarantee if they have to drain the refrigerant and regas they probably wont evacuate the lines properly and just regas and I will end up paying the price in the long run

Hello

I'll just reply here as I don't think it requires a PM and could be helpful to others with the same issue.

I'd contact the installer and just get them back to leak check. If there's oil then there's likely a leak. If it's on the suction line (larger pipe) and depending on the size of it, the flare may not have been tightened up to the correct torque rating when installed or the flare wasn't dead straight when they screwed the nut on. These 2 symptoms are a common cause of leaks.

If this was an issue from install, it should have been picked up on the pressure test prior to evacuation. Unfortunately a lot of installing companies won't pressure test prior to evacuation due to tight margins or being pushed to finish the job faster.

If a vacuum gauge was used after evacuation and during the blank off and decay test, it should also have been picked up then as likely the micron level would have kept rising past the 500 micron ceiling.

Also nothing wrong with using bubbles to check for leaks though micro leaks do take longer to show up. After an hour any micro leaks will be visible in the bubble fluid. Any fridge mechanics should know this though. You are wanting a leak check with an electronic leak detector. I don't always use one as there's times and situations where it doesn't provide an accurate result or even picks up leaks such as on a rooftop or outside where there's a breeze blowing.

Also unsure of how hooking up gauges will indicate a correct system charge as it's only reading pressures/temperatures and these values can fluctuate and read incorrectly depending on ambient temperatures and whether the outdoor fan has ramped down to maintain high side pressure. A more accurate indication would be to recover the charge whilst weighing it and compare to the name plate value plus any additional refrigerant which may have been added.

If you get no where with the installer then you could contact the commission governing plumbing work as this installation should have required a plumbing certificate of compliance to be lodged. I'm unsure of who that is in NSW but in VIC it's the VBA (Victorian Building Authority) or even the ARC (Australian Refrigeration Council) which oversees refrigerant handling licenses.

hth

Hey Joker, we too are looking at getting a Actron Air ESP Plus 19kw system for our new home. The house is double storey around 37squares. We are hoping to get double glazing throughout with R4.1 ceiling batts.

Can you let me know how many zones and outlets you have? How have you set-up the zones? Does the system have wifi capability so you can turn on system say an hour before you get home to either warm or cool it prior to getting home? What is the cooling Kw value and Heating Kw value?

I'm in geelong and air con is add on air con, generally colder areas go with add on, with warmer parts of Australia going with air con's that are cooling first, heating much less important, here in geelong heating is more important than cooling so we tend to go with add on air conditioning, look at the website for details on specs,I do know that it cools my home down easily, I run 3 zones, and at times 2 zones, zone 1 "is always the kitchen family room, 2 is boys bedrooms and their lounge area, 3" is my lounge area and master, 4 is rest of house, rooms are large and good installer is vital, as poor job will make system run poorly, the system your looking at is even better.

Thanks Joker, I like the way you've zoned it and will go with 4 zones too. Is your system wifi capable? Do you have a controller upstairs and downstairs? What are your electricity bills like during summer and winter?

Just to add my personal experiences to this discussion, we recently had a 19kW Actron Que installed, covering five zones. While we haven't experienced summer with it yet, I have found it to be pretty good in winter for heating. We haven't seen a power bill yet, so that might change things a little bit.

Things I like...
- the new user interface is excellent
- the individual room controllers are well designed and easy to use
- remote access to the system worked immediately
- wifi wasn't an add-on feature, it's part of the basic product
- things are very quiet inside

Things I don't like...
- the outdoor unit is ridiculously loud, to the point where I worry about the neighbours hating us
- installation quality wasn't spectacular, they appear to have forgotten to hook up drainage so we're getting water all over our carport floor
- no 3-phase option for Que systems
- 19kW max for Que systems, so larger houses like ours aren't able to heat/cool the entire building at once
- slow startup for heating (it takes about 15 minutes before we feel any change to indoor temperature)

It's definitely a good system, but you need to be careful with sizing and noise levels.

Hi Lurgen.
Good to hear that you like the Actron 19kw, although a bit noisy.
A few queries:
How have you set out your 4 zones?
How much for entire system? What was the added cost for Que?
How many squares is your home? Open plan I presume?
Have you received your first energy bill yet. How does it compare to your previous bills?

We have five zones - master bedroom, living room, kitchen / dining room, other bedrooms, office, with two return air vents. We can't run them all at once, the house is too big for that (~36 sq) but we have an 8kW split system in the kitchen that will pick up some of the load on the real scorchers. Based on how well it heats, I'd say we will be fine running all the zones at once up to about 30 degrees or so, after that it'll be a case of only cooling rooms we use.

Our situation is helped slightly by the fact we are quite high up in the hills. We tend to see temperatures 3 or 4 degrees lower here than the rest of Melbourne, although I haven't been here through a summer yet.

Prices for these things are high. We paid around $22k, with roughly $2k of that being the upgrade to the Que system. Some of that cost increase should be ignored though, as choosing the Que immediately leads to selecting better room controllers. When you compare this to putting in a bunch of split systems it actually comes out as a sensible-ish price. Having a fully integrated controller with phone integration, multiple room controllers, and all the bells and whistles is well worth the increase. We had two evaporative coolers in our last home, and three splits, and I reckon we paid close to the same price for that setup, despite it being a complete pain in the neck to use.

The house isn't open plan either, it's a more traditional layout, so closing off sections is pretty easy to do.

And no energy bills yet, it's very early days for us so I'll be watching things closely. It will be fun to go back through the logs and compared high energy use days to the bill based on the reports you get from the control panel.

Can someone guide me how come people are getting charged $20K+ for their ducted aircons, when the top model aircon itself costs less than $6K? e.g. https://www.airconditioning-online.com.au/daikin/ducted

Am I not understanding something about the complexities of installation process and $15K+ is actually the cost of installation?

Sure.

Yes, you can buy a split system for $6k installed but it doesn't solve the same problem, nor does it work anywhere near as well. Take my old house for example. We had a split in the office, another split in the master bedroom, and a third split in one of the bedrooms. Each cost aroudn $3.5K, so that's roughly $10k in splits. We wanted refrigerative AC in the living area, and found it'd cost at least $8k due to the size of the room so stuck with evap for that area. Had we gone down that path though, we'd have ended up spending $18K to cool four rooms.

These four systems don't talk to each other, they all have slightly different user interfaces, and they take up a lot of outdoor space. Multi-head split would have been an option at this scale, but still, it's a complicated and incomplete setup that leaves large parts of the house without coverage.

It also looked pretty rubbish, with wall units in each room taking up a big chunk of wall space.

The ducted system on the other hand covers every single room in my house. There are no big chunky wall units in each room, just ceiling vents that are unobtrusive. The system is quieter (inside, at least) because the inside unit is up in the roof, well away from living areas. Every room shares a single user interface, which hooks in nicely to my phone and a central control panel.

It cost me maybe $4k extra to get this kind of setup. Maybe. Had I put splits into four bedrooms, two living spaces and a large home office I cannot come up with a configuration that comes in for less than what I paid.

This is a premium system though, don't get me wrong. There are cheaper ways to solve this problem, provided you're OK with making additional compromises. But there are also much more expensive options that could be chosen. I just reached a point where I was sick of a system that only worked in three rooms, was expensive to get serviced, and broke all the time.

Hi Lurgen,

Thanks for the info.

But as I had mentioned above, DUCTED system costs $6K in supply.
I wonder how much does ducted installation labour costs for a 2 storey house.
But certainly not $15K.

The unit itself might cost $6k, but that doesn't cover ductwork, vents, electrical, zone controllers, control panels, gas, wiring, etc, nor does it include an installation warranty. Buying something like this isn't a case of just chucking the parts in a corner and plugging them in, so the cost of the core unit is only a small part of the puzzle. The Daikin units you linked to aren't full systems, they are just the indoor and outdoor unit.

My system took a day and a half for four professionals to install, two of which had undergone extensive training to be able to do this kind of work. I don't think it's a reasonable expectation that the wholesale cost of the hardware is going to be the final cost.