Why the sizing matters
A nine kilowatt boiler in a house that needs fourteen. It works perfectly in October, and in the first genuinely cold week of January it cannot keep up, and everybody blames the boiler. The boiler is fine. Nobody calculated the heat loss before buying it.
The same happens with an air conditioner chosen from floor area alone, with no regard for which way the windows face or how many people are in the room. And with sockets marked out before anyone asked where the wardrobe was going to stand.
So we start with numbers rather than with a catalogue: heat loss, electrical load, pipe diameter, cable section. It is half a day of work, and it decides whether the next fifteen years are comfortable or irritating.
We have worked in Vinnytsia since 2013: heating, air conditioning, ventilation, underfloor heating, electrical work and back-up power. The same crew that installs a system comes back to service it.
There is a counter at the workshop, and it exists for a practical reason rather than an ambitious one. A fitting nobody can find on a Saturday stops a job on Monday. If you need one valve rather than a box of ten, come in and take one.
If the calculation says your idea will not work, we say so before taking any money. We would rather lose the order than be the people who installed a system that cannot heat the house.
01
Wall-hung and floor-standing gas boilers, solid fuel and electric. The pipework around them, radiators or underfloor loops, the flue, the safety group and the expansion vessel.
Output is calculated from the heat loss of the building, not from its floor area. The difference between 24 kW and 18 kW is not only the price on the box: an oversized boiler short-cycles, wears its heat exchanger out faster and burns more gas doing it.
Fitted and commissioned
02
Split and multi-split systems, inverter and on/off. Indoor and outdoor units, the copper line set, the drain, the vacuum and the start-up.
A unit is chosen from the volume of the room, the glazing, the floor it is on and how many people are in it. A 2.5 kW unit in a south-facing room with a full-height window will not cope, and the name on the box is not what went wrong.
Split and multi-split
03
Wet and electric. The manifold, the loops, the thermostats, the pressure test, and staying on site while the screed goes down.
Wet is cheaper to run and makes sense as soon as there is a boiler. Electric is for the case where only the bathroom or the kitchen needs it and there is nowhere sensible to run pipe to.
Wet and electric
04
Supply and extract with heat recovery, ducted kitchen extract, single-room units. The ducts, the diffusers and the controls that decide when any of it runs.
After the windows are replaced a flat stops breathing: the moisture has nowhere to go and mould turns up on the reveals within a season. The windows are not the problem. The natural supply air that used to leak in around the old ones has gone, and nothing replaced it.
Supply, extract, recovery
05
An inverter with batteries, a voltage stabiliser, changeover automation, the distribution board and the wiring behind all of it.
When the power goes off to a schedule, the question is not whether to fit a back-up but what it has to hold up. A gas boiler and a router is one calculation. A boiler, a fridge and a well pump is a completely different one, and the honest answer usually costs more than the round number people arrive with.
Inverters and boards
How a job runs
Nothing here is unusual. What separates a system that works from one that irritates you for years is that somebody did the first stage properly and nobody cut the fourth.
01
Heat loss room by room, electrical load, water demand, and where the units can physically go. We need the walls, the glazing, the orientation and how the place is actually used. Half a day, and everything after it depends on those numbers being right.
02
What goes where, what runs where, and what each part costs, in one document you can remove lines from. Routes are agreed with whoever is doing the finishes now, because a chase in the wrong wall is free to move on paper.
03
Pipe, duct and cable, photographed before anything is closed up, so that in five years somebody knows what is inside the wall. Pressure tests happen here, while what they find is still cheap to fix.
04
Units on the wall, board live, system filled and balanced, circuit vacuumed, curves and thermostats set for how you will really use it. This is the stage that gets cut when a job runs late, and cutting it is why a correctly sized system still heats one room and not another.
05
The same people come back. Not as a nice thing to say: whoever installed a system can diagnose it in ten minutes where a stranger needs two hours. Boiler and recovery unit service is scheduled rather than waited for.
What the figure rests on
There is no price per square metre here, because that number is what causes most of the disappointment in this trade. Here is what the figure actually rests on.
Two flats of the same size can need very different systems. A corner flat with three external walls and north-facing glazing loses far more heat than one in the middle of a block, and the boiler, the radiators and the running cost all follow from that.
The equipment is usually the predictable part. What varies is getting pipe, duct and cable from where they start to where they have to end: through what, across what, and how much has to be opened up and made good again afterwards.
The same installation costs less in a bare shell than in a flat with furniture in it. Dust protection, working hours that suit the neighbours and finishes that already exist all add real hours, and they are stated as their own line rather than buried in a rate.
You can buy it or we can, and the two produce different figures. There is one condition either way: we will not install equipment the calculation says is the wrong size, whoever paid for it, because the complaint afterwards arrives at our door regardless.
The estimate is itemised, so you can see what each part costs and take any of it out. If we open a wall and find something nobody could have known about, we stop and call rather than carry on and add it to the invoice at the end.
Asked on the first visit
Nobody can say from the area alone, and the rule of thumb about one kilowatt per ten square metres is how most undersized systems get bought. It depends on the walls, the glazing, the orientation and the ventilation. The calculation is not expensive and it is the only honest answer anyone can give you.
Yes, and plenty of people do. Send us the model before you order it, because the one thing we will not do is install equipment the calculation says is the wrong size. It is not about the margin. It is that the complaint afterwards arrives at our door regardless of who bought the box.
It depends on the floor build-up, the ceiling height and how quickly you want a room to respond. Underfloor is comfortable and slow; radiators are quicker and take wall space. In a lot of flats the right answer is both, in different rooms, and that is a decision to make at the calculation rather than on site with the screed arriving.
Usually yes, and it will cost more and look like a compromise, because the line set and the condensate have to run somewhere visible. If the renovation has not started, this is the single cheapest decision you can bring forward: an hour of planning now saves a trunking box down the corner of the room for the next fifteen years.
That is the first thing to decide, because the price follows from it. A gas boiler, its controls and a router draw very little, and a small inverter with one battery will carry them through a long outage. Add a fridge and a well pump and you are into a bigger inverter and two or three batteries. Tell us what must not go off, and we will price that rather than a round number.
A flat with heating and electrics is a matter of weeks rather than days, split into first fix and second fix with the other trades in between. We give dates at the estimate and we tell you which of them depend on somebody else finishing first, because those are the ones that actually slip.
Yes, and the practical reason is worth more than the promise: we photographed the first fix before it was closed up and we have the drawing of what is where. Diagnosing our own installation takes minutes. That record is the main thing you are buying and it is why we keep it.
Where it starts
Tell us the address, the area, what the walls are made of and what you want fitted. If you do not know some of it, say so. The first conversation costs nothing and it is the one that decides everything else.
Useful to have to hand
If you do not know some of these, say so. Half of them we can measure ourselves on the first visit, and none of them are a reason to put off the call.
Where to find us
2 Stakhurskoho Street, apartment 70, Vinnytsia, 21027. The drawing is a sketch for orientation rather than a survey; call before you come and somebody will meet you at the door.
