Gorilla and Mushroom Renovation

Depending largely on your usage, there are various ways to plan your air-con layout.

There are a few questions you need to ask:
1) How often do you use the air-con for the living and dining room?
2) How often does the air-con in the living/dining room get on at the same time as the rest of the bedrooms?
3) Are you getting a standard system 3/4 or an invertor?

Using a standard system, one would have more or less a fixed number of BTUs for each room, depending on how you connect the blowers to the compressor.

Using an invertor system, albeit more expensive, will have the BTU distributed based on usage patterns, but would not be very effective if your usage or cooling area is more than the total power output of the system. (Singapore has some limitations on the compressor total horsepower for HDB units).

There is a very good write-up on this at Singapore air-con.blogspot.com

I also got various configurations proposed to me during my search. Try talking to the girl at this Toa Payoh central shop that sells air-con. It is located near to the Crystal Jade restaurant, between Courts and the money-changer. She was one of the few that would educate newbies, like us, on why she configure the air-con layout for your unit, and would recommend various layouts based on your usage needs.

Most important of all, is the budget... see if it is really worth it to get one big unit to cool the big dining room and living room, or is it more efficient to have a curtain partition to divide the room up so that you can cool one portion at a time. Can't be in both the living AND the dining room at the same time all of the time ;)

As to concealing the trunking and pipes… well, it is definitely pleasing to the eyes when it comes to concealing the piping, be it water, gas or air-con trunking... and it is definitely neater when it comes to planning the layout of the furniture as well.

Problem is this, when and should the day come, when there is a leak, or a loss of pressure, for say, the gas pipe, doing a trace for the source of the leak would be a big problem. What if it is a water leak? And if the leak is within the concealed portion? One would have to demolish the custom furniture or L-box that is concealing it to fix the problem. This means money spent ON TOP of fixing the leaky pipe --> to demolish AND redo the custom feature that once concealed the pipes.

For a practical person, like myself, this would be a big no no… IMHO, not really feasible, if it can be avoided, avoid.

There are many ways to run the piping without having to conceal it, and still achieve the uncluttered look…
One way is to run all the piping or trunking along the beams as much as possible, so that when you paint over the trunking, it will look like part of the wall.

The other way is to run as much of the piping as possible in places where it can be camouflaged, like behind the beams, in the toilets... etc

The third way is to run the piping along the top part of the wall as near to the ceiling as possible, and then build a pellmet to conceal it. A pellmet is exposed at the bottom, so doing a trace is easy, even if you need to demolish a portion of it to fix any problems, it is still cheaper to replace than an L-box or a custom furniture piece

Work with your ID or contractor regarding this, they will definitely be able to plan it better than us.

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Related:
Air-con... Trunking

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