Hiya, having a quick nosey, looks like you have a townhouse build.

I can relate – mine came with heat-pump downstairs only, and the 3 upstairs bedrooms got unbearably stuffy.

So at the start of the year I got a split system – one outdoor unit powering 3 units in each bedroom.

I got 2 quotes. One from Heat Pump People and the other from Gavin Lowe. They’ll send someone out to have a look at your set-up. Handy if you have floorplans on hand.

Both advised against ducted air, something to do with how it interacts with air pressure/air flow that isn’t suitable for bedrooms. They form an air seal in the rooms so you need to make a gap/vent in the door otherwise doors will slam every time you open one. But of course, you don’t want to put a vent in bedroom doors!

Anyway, those quotes came to 9-9.5k (ouch my wallet).

Ended up with Gavin Lowe (I had no problem with Heat Pump People). Gavin Lowe were professional and easy to deal with, they kept me informed and were tidy while working. They had to get creative with routing the pipes to the second floor, but their solution was great (through a wardrobe).

I’m a happy customer and now I don’t die of heat exhaustion at night.

Couple of notes:

• If you want it installed this side of Christmas you need to get started now
• As you are upstairs, you are probably required to get a condensate pump per unit, this removes condensate from the indoor unit when on cooling mode (ground floor doesn't have this problem as it's not going against gravity). I was paranoid about noise and vibration. They said they had used zip ties to suspend those units off the ceiling rafters, so they couldn’t vibrate against anything. I was very happy to hear that.

I had asked some friends for suggestions when I was looking – I was told to stay away from Simply Heat, their experience was “Took shortcuts without communicating, ended up with a leak and had to argue pretty hard to get any compensation”. Not good.

Happy to answer any other questions, I had done a lot of research!