Energy Efficient Heating and Cooling Upgrades

This is the part people get wrong. VEU is not a rebate you apply for and wait on. The discount is applied by an accredited provider directly to the installation invoice, so the price you are quoted is already net of it. There is no form to lodge afterwards, no waiting period, and no income test.

The eligibility rules that matter are straightforward. The property has to be at least two years old, the equipment has to be on the approved product list, and there is a minimum customer contribution of $200 including GST, so no upgrade under the scheme is ever completely free. The program changed on 30 September 2026, so the amount available shifts. We confirm the current figure in writing at quote time rather than publishing a number here that may already be out of date.

Not everything sold as an efficiency upgrade earns its keep. In rough order of value for a typical western suburbs home, replacing ducted gas heating with reverse cycle is first, replacing electric resistance hot water with a heat pump is second, and adding zoning or better controls to an existing ducted system is third.

The reason the first two dominate is that they change the physics. A gas heater converts roughly 80 to 92 percent of its fuel into heat and can never do better than the fuel you bought. A reverse cycle system returns 3 to 4 units of heat per unit of electricity because it is moving heat rather than making it. A heat pump hot water system uses roughly a third of the electricity of a conventional electric storage tank for the same hot water.

Heating a room on reverse cycle costs roughly 28 to 36 cents an hour against 50 to 72 cents an hour for ducted gas. Over a Melbourne winter that difference lands somewhere between $200 and $450 a year for most households, and more for homes that heat a large area for long hours.

The second saving is the one people forget. If gas heating and gas hot water are the only remaining gas appliances, removing both lets you disconnect the gas service entirely and stop paying the daily supply charge, which is a fixed cost you pay whether you burn anything or not. Do the arithmetic on your own bill, because that line is often worth several hundred dollars a year on its own.

Before spending on equipment, it is worth spending on the building. Ceiling insulation that has been disturbed by other trades, duct joints that have separated in the roof space, and duct insulation that has degraded all waste output you have already paid to produce. We find disconnected ducts on a surprising number of homes, often near where a solar or plumbing job happened.

On the controls side, adding zoning to an existing ducted system lets you stop heating and cooling empty bedrooms, and a properly located thermostat stops the system chasing a reading taken next to a sunny window or a heat source. These are small jobs with sensible payback that nobody puts in a brochure.

Electrification runs into the switchboard eventually. Older boards in the west often have no spare capacity, no RCD protection on existing circuits, or a main switch and supply that will not comfortably carry a ducted system, a heat pump and an EV charger at once.

We assess the board and the incoming supply as part of any upgrade quote, and where an upgrade is needed it appears as a line item rather than an ugly surprise mid job. If you are planning several changes over a couple of years, it is worth doing the board once, properly, at the start.