Cool in summer.Warm in winter.

It heats as well as it cools

An air conditioning unit is a heat pump. In summer it moves heat out of the room. In winter it runs the other way and moves heat in. Same unit, same pipework.

An electric heater turns one unit of electricity into one unit of heat. A heat pump moves three or four units of heat for every one it uses, because it isn't making heat, it's moving it. That holds up in the cold — there is still heat outside to move.

What an install involves

• An indoor unit on the wall.
• An outdoor unit on a bracket or on the ground.
• A pipe run between the two: refrigerant, power and a condensate drain. Where that can go decides where the units can go, so it's the first thing I look at.
• A core drill through the wall, usually 65 mm.
• A vacuum and a pressure test before any gas goes in.

One room is usually a day. More rooms or a long pipe run is longer. I'll tell you which on the first visit.

Sizing

Bigger is not better. An oversized unit reaches temperature, shuts off, and never runs long enough to take the moisture out. The room ends up cold and damp rather than comfortable, and the unit wears out sooner.

It depends on the room size, which way the windows face, how much glass there is, and what else in the room makes heat.

Servicing

Filters, coils, condensate and a gas check. An unserviced unit doesn't usually stop. It gets worse slowly, costs more to run, then fails in a heatwave. Once a year for a house.

Repairs

Blowing warm, icing up, dripping, tripping the breaker, or showing a fault code. Ring me and describe it.

Gas is my trade, domestic and commercial, so the boiler and the cylinder are part of the same visit rather than a different firm.

What that covers

• Heat pumps — air to water, and the cylinder that goes with one.
• Wet systems: radiators, pipework, controls.
• Hot water — cylinders, unvented, pressure and flow.
• The plumbing side of any of the above.

If the house has air conditioning as well, that's one engineer for the lot.

Most firms do one of them. An air conditioning company can't touch your boiler. A heating company can't touch refrigerant. LatterHC is gas by trade — domestic and commercial — with several years on air conditioning and heat pumps on top of it.

That matters most where the parts meet: a heat pump and the cylinder it feeds, or air conditioning in the rooms the heating never quite reaches. One firm sees the whole house instead of its own corner of it.

Standards

Work is done to the manufacturer's specification, and every job leaves a written record of what was done and what was measured — not a scribbled invoice. If something isn't right, that record is how you prove it.

You get the price before the work starts.

I'm on the tools most of the day. If I don't pick up, leave your name and number and I'll ring back that evening.

Useful to have ready

• What it's doing, or not doing.
• Any fault code on the remote or the indoor unit.
• The make and model, usually on a sticker on the side.
• Roughly how old it is.

None of that is essential. If you don't know, say so.

Where

Pembury and around Tunbridge Wells.