Why Bungalows Are the Easiest Homes to Air Condition

If you live in a bungalow you have, without knowing it, the easiest house in Britain to air condition. It is worth understanding why, because it affects both what you pay and how the finished job looks.

The loft sits above every room

In a two-storey house, getting pipework from an upstairs bedroom to an outdoor unit at ground level usually means running it down an external wall in trunking. In a bungalow there is a loft directly above every habitable room.

That means pipe can run horizontally through the loft and drop straight down the internal wall cavity behind the indoor unit. In a lot of bungalows that removes external trunking altogether — the only thing on the outside is the outdoor unit itself.

Everything happens at ground level

The outdoor unit goes on a wall at ground level or on feet on a slab. No working at height, no scaffold tower, no ladder work for the installer. On a two-storey install, access equipment is a real line on the quote; here it simply is not there.

Pipe runs are shorter too, because everything is on one floor. Most bungalow installations sit comfortably inside the length the outdoor unit is pre-charged for, which means no extra refrigerant and no extra time charging the system.

Why bungalows need it more than most

The same shape that makes a bungalow easy to install makes it prone to overheating. A bungalow has far more roof per square metre of floor than a house does, so it collects much more of the summer sun. In older stock the loft insulation is often thin by modern standards, and a loft can easily reach 50 degrees on a hot afternoon, radiating down through the ceiling into every room below.

Add the large picture windows typical of bungalows built in the sixties and seventies, and shallow or flat roof sections with no loft void at all over parts of the plan, and you have a house that gets hot and stays hot.

The one thing to ask any installer

If the pipework is going through the loft, ask how they will handle the insulation and the condensate.

Refrigerant pipe carries cold liquid through a very hot loft. If the insulation is poor or taped badly at the joints, the pipe sweats, and that water ends up on your ceiling. The condensate drain has to run with a consistent fall the whole way to its outlet, which in a loft needs planning rather than improvising — or it needs a pump, properly sited.

It is not difficult work, but it is the detail that separates a job that is still dry in five years from one that is not. Any competent installer will have a clear answer.

The winter half

Worth remembering that these systems heat as well as cool, which matters more in a bungalow than most. If you are at home during the day, heating the one or two rooms you are actually using with a reverse-cycle unit is considerably cheaper than firing the whole heating system for the entire building.