DIY or professional heating install?
What is flatly illegal to do yourself in Victoria, what you genuinely can and should do, the insurance trap that turns a small saving into an uninsured house, and the asbestos risk sitting in a lot of older Ballarat roof cavities.
What you cannot legally do yourself.
We would rather be blunt than polite about this part, because the consequences are not small.
- Gas work. Gasfitting in Victoria must be carried out by a licensed gasfitter working to AS/NZS 5601.1, the gas installations standard, and a compliance certificate has to be issued for the Type A appliance. This is not a grey area or a technicality, it is an offence under Victorian gas safety law, with Energy Safe Victoria as the regulator. The practical problem is just as bad as the legal one: an unlicensed gas install cannot be certified, which means it cannot be legally connected and will fail the moment anyone qualified looks at it.
- Refrigerant work. Handling refrigerant requires an ARCtick licence under the Commonwealth Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act 1989, and doing it unlicensed carries serious penalties. The DIY split systems sold as pre-charged do not get you around the rest of it.
- Electrical connection. Fixed wiring is a licensed electrician’s job, to AS/NZS 3000. On a reverse-cycle install this often includes a dedicated circuit and sometimes a switchboard upgrade, which runs $300 to $1,200 on its own.
Put simply, every part of a ducted heating or refrigerated cooling installation that matters is licensed work. There is no version of this job that a homeowner legally completes. The choosing an installer guide covers how to check those licences are real before you hand over a deposit.
The insurance trap.
This is the part that turns a bad idea into a genuinely dangerous one. Unlicensed work generally voids cover for anything flowing from that work. If an unlicensed gas or electrical installation causes a fire, a carbon monoxide incident or water damage, the insurer will ask whether the work was done by a licensed tradesperson and will look for the compliance certificate. No certificate is a straightforward path to a declined claim. It can also follow you to the sale of the house, where a buyer’s conveyancer asks for the paperwork on a system you cannot produce paperwork for.
Set the saving against that. A ducted gas install in Ballarat runs $7,500 to $13,000, of which the unit itself is a meaningful chunk. The labour and certification you are trying to save is a few thousand dollars. The downside is an uninsured house and, with carbon monoxide in the picture, a risk that is not measured in dollars at all. That is not a trade we would make, and we would say the same if you were quoting someone else for the work.
What you absolutely should do yourself.
More than people think, and we are not going to pretend everything needs a tradesperson. None of these involve gas, refrigerant or fixed wiring:
- Clean or replace the return-air filter. The single highest-value thing an owner can do, and a blocked filter is behind a surprising share of the no-heat callouts we attend in a Ballarat winter. Do it monthly through winter, not annually.
- Vacuum the return-air grille. Two minutes, and it keeps the fan from fighting the system.
- Keep the outdoor unit clear. Leaf litter, grass clippings and vegetation crowding a condenser stop it breathing. Give it clear air on all sides.
- Replace thermostat batteries and check the isolation switch before you call anyone. We have driven to plenty of no-heat jobs that were a tripped switch.
- Learn your system. Knowing which zones are which and how your controller schedules actually saves real money across a long Central Highlands winter. Our zoning page explains why.
Do those five and you have captured most of the value a homeowner can add. Everything past them is our problem, not yours. What a professional service adds on top is on the service and repair page.
Asbestos, and why the roof cavity is not a hobby.
This one is specific to Ballarat’s housing stock and it gets ignored. Homes built before about 1990, which is a large slice of the established suburbs through Ballarat East, Soldiers Hill, Golden Point and Sebastopol, can contain asbestos materials in the roof cavity, and older heating installations sometimes used asbestos-containing material around flues, plenums and heater surrounds. Disturbing it by crawling through a roof space or ripping out an old unit is exactly how fibres get released, and you will not know you have done it. If your home is that vintage and you are touching old heating, get it assessed rather than guessing. Disposal is regulated too: asbestos waste has to go to a licensed disposal facility under EPA Victoria rules, and it cannot go in a City of Ballarat kerbside bin or onto a trailer for the tip. That alone puts the job outside what a homeowner can finish lawfully.
The rest of the roof cavity is no picnic either. Ballarat sits at roughly 435m in the Central Highlands, and a tiled roof on a frosty July morning is genuinely treacherous, while the same cavity in February is brutally hot. Brittle old tiles crack under a knee. Working up there is a real skill and a real risk, and it is worth being honest that this is a large part of what you are paying an installer for.
Supplying your own unit.
The half-DIY version people try is buying the unit online and hiring someone to fit it. It usually goes badly. Most manufacturer warranties depend on installation by an accredited installer, so a self-supplied unit often arrives with its warranty already compromised. Many installers, us included, will not warrant workmanship on a unit they did not supply, because when it fails there is no way to separate a bad unit from a bad install. And the sizing is almost always wrong, because a unit chosen off a website is chosen off floor area rather than a heat-load calculation, and floor-area sizing in Ballarat means undersized.
A worked example, Delacombe.
A four-bedroom home in Delacombe. The owner had bought a ducted gas furnace online for around $2,900, saving roughly $1,100 on our supply price, and wanted us to install it. Two problems. It was a 25 MJ/h unit and the heat-load calculation for that house came out needing 30 MJ/h, so it would have run flat out every winter and never quite got there. And the warranty terms required accredited installation with a supply chain we could not verify. We declined the install and quoted the job properly at $10,600 with a correctly sized 6-star unit, ducts, twelve outlets, controller, compliance certificate and commissioning. The $1,100 saving would have bought a system that underperformed for fifteen years. The cost guide shows where the money in a quote actually goes.
Where we work.
Get it done licensed, certified and sized properly.
Licensed gasfitting, ARCtick refrigerant work, compliance certificate included, fixed written quote.