Why Perth HVAC businesses lose winter heating jobs

First properly cold morning in Karrinyup. A homeowner walks to the wall controller, turns on the ducted system for the first time since March, and gets nothing. It clicks, hunts, and stops.

She searches, taps the first result, and rings. Nobody picks up, because every technician that business has is already on a job and the owner is somewhere on the Mitchell. She does not leave a message. She rings the next one, gets a person, and books.

That first business never learned the call happened. No voicemail, no email, no trace. Just a slightly quieter Tuesday in the middle of their best season.

What actually drives Perth's heating window

Perth winters are mild by Australian standards, which leads a lot of operators to underestimate the season. Mild is not the same as absent, and the shape of the demand matters more than the depth of the cold.

Systems fail on first use, not gradually

A ducted reverse cycle unit or a gas heater sits idle from roughly March to May. When it gets switched on for the first time, a share of them do not start. Capacitors, gas valves, control boards and choked filters all announce themselves on the same handful of mornings across the city, because everyone turns their heating on the same week.

That is what makes the window sharp. It is not a gentle ramp. It is a step.

Perth is mid-switch from gas to reverse cycle

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it changes what the enquiry is.

Reverse cycle systems run at a coefficient of performance around 3.0 to 4.5, meaning they deliver roughly three to four times more heat energy than the electricity they consume.[3] Against current WA energy pricing, heat pumps generally win on running cost for continuous whole-season heating, while gas keeps an advantage for intermittent use.[4]

So a winter breakdown call is frequently not a repair enquiry at all. It is a replacement conversation that the homeowner has not framed as one yet. Whether you get to have that conversation depends entirely on whether you answered.

Evaporative-cooled homes have no heating at all

A large share of Perth housing was built with evaporative cooling. Evaporative works by drawing air across wet pads, which means it cools and cannot heat. Those households run gas ducted, gas point heaters, or portable electric units through winter.

That group is the most obvious reverse cycle upgrade market in the city, and in our experience almost nobody contacts them deliberately. So they turn up as inbound enquiries on the coldest week of the year, in a queue, competing with breakdowns.

What a heating enquiry is actually worth

You will see articles quoting a single average heating job value and multiplying it out. We will not, because the spread is too wide for the number to mean anything, and we would rather you trusted the rest of this page.

Perth prices including supply, installation and GST, verified 2026.[2] Replacing an existing ducted system where the ductwork can be reused typically comes in materially lower than a fresh install.[5]

Why your capacity collapses at exactly the wrong moment

The uncomfortable structure of HVAC is that the conditions creating your highest lead volume are the same conditions destroying your ability to answer.

Two different kinds of enquiry also arrive at once and pull in opposite directions. A breakdown is urgent, low-to-mid value, and wants someone today. A replacement quote is high value, slower, and wants a conversation. Handling both by hand, while your crews are fully deployed, is not a discipline problem. It is an arithmetic one.

The window is shorter than most operators assume

A cold house is an urgent problem. The homeowner in Kingsley who cannot get heat on a July morning is not putting the phone down and waiting until tomorrow; they are working down the list until somebody answers. The window is the length of that list.

There are confident percentages online about how fast a business has to respond. They come from overseas vendors selling phone systems, so we do not repeat them here. Your own call log over a fortnight in the peak is the only figure worth acting on.

The three things breaking your follow-up

We have audited enough Perth HVAC businesses to say these three turn up together far more often than any one of them turns up alone.

1. You are the system, and the system stops when you stop

If follow-up depends on someone remembering to check the missed call list at the end of the day, it stops working the moment everyone is on site. During peak, everyone is always on site. The process fails hardest at the exact moment it matters most, which is not a coincidence, it is the design.

2. Your texts may not be arriving

Plenty of operators have automated SMS configured and quietly wonder why nobody replies. The platform reports delivered and nothing comes back.

In our experience the cause is almost always registration. Australian commercial SMS falls under the Spam Act 2003, enforced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. It requires consent you can evidence, clear identification of your business by legal name or ABN, and a working unsubscribe processed within five business days. ACMA also requires every alphanumeric Sender ID to be listed on the SMS Sender ID Register by 1 July 2026.[6]

That last change bites in a way people do not expect. A text sent under an unregistered business name arrives labelled "Unverified", next to the scam messages, so you can have consent, identification and opt-out all correct and still lose the job because your text looked like a scam. Which of your texts it affects. Separately, Spam Act breaches carry penalties of up to A$3.64 million for a company and A$728,000 for an individual.[6]

3. Your job history has a replacement schedule hidden in it

Most established Perth HVAC businesses have several hundred past installs and service customers sitting in a spreadsheet, an old CRM, or a box of job cards.

Be sceptical of anyone quoting you a reactivation response rate before they have seen that list. What makes it work is not volume, it is that the list has dates on it. Air conditioners have a service life. Evaporative-only homes have no heating. A quote from two winters ago belongs to someone who has since spent two more winters being cold.

None of that requires guessing. We sort the list by age and install type, then contact people before the coldest week rather than during it.

The Perth HVAC year, and where the work actually sits

Treating winter in isolation is part of the problem. The demand curve runs all year and each stretch needs something different from you.

What the fix actually looks like

Less complicated than most operators expect, and it does not involve hiring anyone or learning software. This is the order we build in, and the order matters.

1. Register the sender first. The ACMA Sender ID lodgement has the longest lead time of anything in a build, so it goes in on day one. Everything downstream is pointless if the messages do not arrive.
2. Text back every missed enquiry inside a minute. From your own business number, asking what has failed and which suburb, so the caller has an answer before they scroll further down Google.
3. Separate the breakdown from the replacement. A no-heat call in July and a ducted quote request are different jobs with different urgency and different value. We flag them differently so the big ones do not sit behind a filter clean.
4. Follow up the quotes. Day 2, day 7, day 21, written the way you speak. Replacement decisions take weeks and almost nobody chases them.
5. Work the list ahead of the season. Sorted by install age and system type, contacted in April for heating and September for cooling.

All of it sits behind the ServiceM8 or Simpro you already run and pushes work into it. You do not get a login and you do not learn anything new.

Frequently asked questions