Home air conditioning that feels like the finest hotel you have ever stayed in

You deserve a system that makes your home comfortable all year round, designed around your house rather than pulled off a shelf, and looked after from the day it goes in. Here is what that looks like in practice.

I work to a very high standard, and being able to is one of the reasons I started this business.

Working for somebody else, you can be told to put the equipment in and move on. Here I decide how every job gets done, and I would far rather do it properly.

So the pipework is straight, everything is clipped and labelled, and the plant areas are ones I would happily have photographed.

I am F-Gas certified and Elevate is registered with Refcom, one of the two registrations a company must hold to work on this equipment legally.

Rob Shute runs the heating side alongside me, so when a house needs both, the same company designs all of it.

One room, from £1,500. A single indoor unit paired with its own outdoor unit, fitted through an outside wall.

A four-bedroom house with every room cooled, £5,000 to £6,000. That figure is for running everything from one outdoor unit.

The same four-bedroom house, £3,000 to £3,500. Same rooms, same comfort, but with several outdoor units instead of one.

That gap surprises people, so here is why it exists.

One indoor unit paired with one outdoor unit is the simple, cheap way to do it. Three rooms done that way means three outdoor units on your wall.

Running several indoor units from one outdoor unit is what most people would rather look at. But that outdoor unit must be sized to run all of them at once.

So instead of three small units you need one much larger, more complicated one. The equipment alone can cost close to double.

So the tidier option is the dearer one. Plenty of people choose it anyway and we would not talk them out of it, but it should be a decision you make rather than something you discover inside a quote.

You cannot buy a cooling-only air conditioner any more. Every unit we fit is a heat pump, so it heats the room as well as cools it.

The rule of thumb: if it is big enough to cool the room, it is big enough to heat it.

That makes it the fastest way to warm up a room, and a useful backup if your boiler goes down in February.

For a room that never gets warm enough in winter and is unbearable in July, one installation solves both problems.

There is a government grant for air-to-air heating, but it sits inside the Boiler Upgrade Scheme. It only applies if you are replacing a complete heating system.

At the time of writing there is no registration route open for installers to offer it. If that changes, we will say so here.

Portable units have their place and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

What matters is where the noisy part sits. In a fitted system the compressor is outside the house, which is why noise almost never comes up.

In a portable unit the compressor is in the box in your bedroom. They are loud. Not background loud, properly loud.

They also have to vent out of a window, and that window has to stay open while it runs, which on a ground floor is a security decision as much as a comfort one.

For cooling a living room during the day, a portable will do a job. For sleeping, or a quiet room of an evening, most people cannot live with the noise.

One customer we are fitting now has a portable in his cinema room. He has asked us to fit a proper system there, because he cannot use the room while the portable runs.

There are two moments when nobody books air conditioning, and between them they cover most of the year.

In winter, it is impossible to imagine ever being too hot, so it drops off the list.

In summer, the moment it becomes urgent, it is already too late: everybody rings in the same fortnight, we are booked, and the equipment is wherever the equipment is.

The answer is to order it in the months when you are not thinking about it. Survey done properly, equipment ordered without pressure, system running long before the weather turns.

Supply matters too. One of the world's largest manufacturers moved a factory in summer 2026 and it did not go smoothly, so demand shifted to everyone else and stock levels followed.

Equipment that normally arrives within a couple of days has taken anywhere from a week to two months. Ordering ahead takes that risk off your project.