Air conditioning installation in Alicante and the northern Costa Blanca

Most air conditioning that disappoints was specified badly rather than installed badly. An undersized unit runs flat out all afternoon and never quite gets there; an oversized one cools the air quickly, switches off, and leaves the room clammy because it never ran long enough to remove any moisture.

Getting it right is a calculation, not a guess, and it depends on things a catalogue cannot know: which way the room faces, what the glazing is like, what is above it and how much of the day it is in full Alicante sun.

How much cooling does a room here actually need?

A rough working figure for this climate is 100 to 130 watts of cooling per square metre for a normal, reasonably insulated room — so a 20 m² bedroom lands somewhere around 2 to 2.6 kW. That is the starting point, not the answer, and the corrections matter more than the base number.

A west-facing room takes the afternoon sun and needs materially more than a north-facing one of identical size. A top-floor flat under a flat roof needs more again. Large or single-glazed windows push it up; a shaded ground floor in an old building with thick walls pulls it down. Two people and a television in a small room add a surprising amount.

This is why we measure rather than ask what size you had in mind. The commonest fault we are called to fix is a unit that was sold on price per kilowatt and is simply the wrong size for the room it is in.

Split, multi-split or ducted?

A single split is one indoor unit to one outdoor unit, and it is the right answer for one room you actually use. It is the cheapest to fit, the easiest to service and the least disruptive to install, and for a bedroom or a single living room nothing else beats it on value.

A multi-split runs several indoor units from one outdoor unit, which matters when façade space is limited — a flat where the community will not accept four condensers on the elevation, for instance. The trade-off is that the outdoor unit is shared: it is sized for the whole system, and a fault takes every room out at once.

Ducted works air through a false ceiling and puts grilles in each room, which gives you even temperatures and almost nothing on the walls. It is the most comfortable and the most expensive, and it genuinely needs to be planned before the ceilings go in. Retrofitting it into a finished flat usually means losing ceiling height in the hallway.

What does the electrical side involve?

Any fixed air conditioning above the smallest sizes wants its own circuit from the board, with its own breaker sized to the unit and its own residual current protection. It is a motor load that starts against pressure and then runs for hours, which is exactly the duty that finds a weak connection on a shared circuit.

The other question is whether your contracted power can absorb it. A single split in a bedroom rarely changes anything. Three or four indoor units, or a ducted system, running at the same time as an oven and an induction hob is a different calculation, and it is better done before the equipment is ordered than after the main switch starts tripping in August.

We check the board and the available power as part of quoting, in the same way we do for a car charger. If the honest answer is that the installation needs a circuit adding or the supply reviewing, you hear it at the quote stage.

Where the outdoor unit goes, and why it matters more here

Salt air corrodes condensers, and how quickly depends almost entirely on where the unit is mounted. Within a few hundred metres of the sea — which covers most of Playa de San Juan, El Campello and the Villajoyosa seafront — a unit in direct onshore wind with no protection will lose fins and develop leaks years earlier than the same unit on a sheltered elevation.

What helps is practical rather than exotic: put it out of the prevailing onshore wind where the building allows, keep it off the ground so salt spray and splash cannot sit under it, leave real clearance for airflow so it is not recirculating its own hot air, and rinse the coil with fresh water periodically. Coastal-grade coil coatings are worth specifying if the position is genuinely exposed.

The other constraint is the community. On an apartment block the elevation is usually communal, so where a condenser may be fixed is often already decided by the statutes or by an existing installation pattern. We work to that rather than mounting it where it is easiest and leaving you to argue about it later.

What does it need afterwards?

Filters want cleaning every few weeks in the season, and that is a job for you rather than an engineer — a clogged filter is the single commonest cause of "it is not cooling like it used to". A unit that has lost performance gradually over one summer is usually telling you about its filters, not its gas.

Beyond that, an annual check before the season covers the coil, the condensate drain, the electrical connections and the operating pressures. The condensate drain is the one that causes damage when ignored: it blocks with dust and algae, and the water finds its way onto a ceiling instead.

A unit that genuinely has lost refrigerant has a leak, and topping it up without finding the leak simply sells you the same gas again next year. We look for the leak.