Living in the tropics I never expected to want a heater in the house, but these last few morning have been cold, about 10C – 12C (50F – 54F), when I have to get out of bed. It can be a bit chilly, especially on the feet on the hardwood floor.

We have a single oil heater that we will be setting up in the bedroom of our 2-year old, but nothing for the rest of us. Our Blueway Airconditioner is reverse cycle, and is supposed to have a heater, but I can’t figure out how to get it to work.

The winter in Townsville only really lasts for a month or so, so I really can’t justify purchasing heaters for the other rooms of the house. I actually really like sleeping under the covers when it is this cold, but it’s not very pleasant getting out of bed in the morning or out of the shower late at night.

Right now we have a 24,000 btu Blueway Air Conditioner with 6000watt cooling capacity in our main living area that has been working very well. It manages to cool the area fairly well, given that the odd shape of the room. I’ve previously written a review of the Blueway AS24-VR, so you read the full review here.

We are now looking for a split inverter air conditioner to put in the master bedroom once it is finished. I was thinking about getting another inverter Blueway Air Conditioner as our other one has worked out pretty well. Continue Reading →

We purchased a very reasonably priced Blueway Split Inverter Air Conditioner for our living room from Harvey Norman. The Air Conditioner is a Blueway AS24-VR with 6000watt cooling capacity (we don’t really care about the heating up here in the tropics, but the air conditioner also has 8000watt heating capacity).

As you can see in the photo the head unit of the AS24-VR is quite large. It almost didn’t fit between the ceiling and the window, which was a problem we hadn’t planned for in purchasing an air conditioner.

The external compressor unit of the Blueway air conditioner I have found to be very quiet, but like the head unit the compressor unit is quite large.
Continue Reading →

Well, today marks the official start of the air conditioning season.

Despite getting the roof on our house sprayed with a reflective paint, today we fired up the Blueway split inverter air conditioner in the living area of our house. Most of our Northern Hemisphere friends would probably be starting up their boilers or furnaces right about now, but not us.

Today hit 31C and about 60% humidity. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s certainly felt warm today. I remember when I used to live in Canada we would look forward to the days that it would hit 30C, heck, we were excited when it broke 25C if I remember correctly. I guess that things are a bit different living in the tropics.

We still have a few more things to do to the house to help to passively cool it. I prefer to run the air conditioner as little as possible, but it really does get unbearable here during the summer. Here are a few of the things that we are doing to passively cool the house:

• Roof insulation
• Louvers at the back to catch the breeze
• Window hoods (still to be installed)
• Screening all the windows so we can open them (still have one window in the living room to screen)
• Trees to shade the side of the house (we had to cut down a bunch that were hitting the power line and one that was rotted out, we need to replace those)

Unfortunately because our house is a traditional 1870’s minor’s cottage there are no overhangs on the roof on the sides of the house. This means that the sun is always on the side of the house heating up the walls. It would be great to extend the eves, but given everything else that we need to do I don’t think it is very practical to be considering that.