Water Cooled Air Conditioning for Residential Properties in London

Yes. A water cooled system will cool your room to the same temperature as a conventional system, down to around 18°C.

Our condensers provide up to 15kW of cooling capacity using up to 5kW of electricity, and a single condenser can cool up to five rooms at once. That makes our water cooled systems as powerful and efficient as any conventional air conditioning system with an external condenser.

On the hottest days, a water cooled system can actually be more effective. A conventional system has to reject heat into the outside air, which gets harder the hotter that air becomes. Even when it’s above 30°C outside, the water entering your property typically stays at around 20°C or below, so our system can remove heat more efficiently on the days you need it most.

Our water cooled air conditioning system is fully internal, with no outdoor unit, so nothing changes on the outside of your property and planning permission isn’t needed. That makes water cooled air conditioning the perfect solution for apartments, listed buildings and properties in conservation areas, where installing an external condenser often requires a planning application.

If your building is listed, we’d still recommend a quick word with your local planning office, as Listed Building Consent can apply to internal works. If you’re a leaseholder, it’s also worth checking your lease or speaking to your freeholder, as some leases require you to notify them of internal works.

Our water cooled system does provide heating; however, we advise only using this as a backup and not a primary source of heating for your property.

Installation is straightforward and takes on average one day per indoor unit, carried out by one of our own engineering teams.

First, we install the condenser. It's connected to your water mains, drainage and electrical supply, and its compact design means it can be concealed in a utility room or cupboard.

Next, the indoor units go in. These can be wall mounted, floor mounted or ducted, and we fit one in each room you want cooled. We agree the best position for each at the video consultation stage, so your property is cooled as efficiently as possible.

Finally, we connect everything together. Two insulated refrigerant pipes and a communication cable run between each indoor unit and the condenser, through small access holes cut into the plasterboard. We then pressure test the system and make good the access holes.

Once that's done, we fully test and commission the system, and talk you through how to use it before we leave.

It’s hard to give an exact figure, as water usage depends on several factors:

Setpoint temperature: The cooler you set the room, the more water the system uses. Cooling a room to 18°C uses more water than our recommended setting of 22–23°C.

Outdoor temperature: The hotter it is outside the more heat is being transferred from the outdoor air to the cooler room being air conditioned, therefore the system’s water consumption increases to remove it.

Building construction: How your property is built affects how much heat it gains and holds. A building with a lot of glass and thermal insulation will absorb external heat and retain it in the building for longer.

Incoming water temperature: The system uses cold water to cool the refrigerant. The colder the incoming water, the less of it is needed to remove the latent heat from the refrigerant.

Running time: A system left on all day will use much more water than one switched on for a few hours to cool a bedroom before bed.

As a guide: An average 5m x 4m bedroom with a typical amount of glazing, insulated to modern building regulations, would need a 2kW indoor unit and a condenser unit. With an outdoor temperature of 27°C and an incoming water temperature of 12°C, the condenser would use around 40 litres of water per hour to cool the room to 22°C.

Our condenser units only use water while they’re actively cooling. Once the room reaches its setpoint, the condenser switches off. Maintaining that temperature typically needs only 20–30 minutes of running time per hour, so water use drops once the room has cooled.

Yes, in some cases. The water leaving the system has been heated to around 45–50°C, so it can be reused. We can connect the unit to a large hot water storage cylinder, which lets you use the heated water for a shower or bath.

However, this isn't always practical, as hot water cylinders take up a lot of space and add to the installation cost, so we’ll let you know at your survey whether it’s an option for your home.

If your building has a communal heating system or a chilled water circuit, our water-cooled condenser can connect to it with no wastewater at all. This is dependent on the water flow temperatures running through those systems, which we’ll check at your survey.