An air conditioner usually comes with two warranties, not one, and people tend to only find that out when something breaks. There’s the manufacturer’s warranty on the equipment itself, and there’s the installer’s workmanship warranty on the job they did fitting it. They cover different things, they’re held by different companies, and the fastest way to get nowhere on a claim is to ring the wrong one.
Two warranties, two different companies
The manufacturer warrants the hardware. Compressor, indoor and outdoor coils, fan motors, the control board: if a component fails because it was faulty from the factory, that’s their problem to fix. Terms vary enormously between brands and even between model ranges, and parts-only versus parts-and-labour is a distinction worth reading before you buy.
The installer warrants their own work. Brackets, mounting, the drain line, the refrigerant pipework and its flares, the electrical connection, the commissioning. If the unit is cooling fine but there’s water dripping down your wall from a drain that was never fallen properly, that’s not a manufacturer defect. That’s the install, and the installer wears it.
So before you call anyone, work out which side of that line your fault sits on. It saves a week of being bounced between a call centre and a mobile number.
What’s usually excluded before you even start
Most equipment warranties carve out a standard set of things. None of it is unfair, it’s just easy to miss:
- Wear parts and consumables: filters, and in some cases things like remote batteries and drain accessories.
- Damage from outside the unit: storms, surges, vermin chewing wiring, salt corrosion on a coastal installation unless a marine-rated unit was specified.
- Commercial use of a domestic unit: running a home-rated split in a shop or a server room, where the duty cycle is far beyond what it was built for.
- The cost of getting to the unit: scaffolding, roof access or a scissor lift to reach an awkward outdoor unit is commonly on you, even when the part itself is covered.
- Anything the unit was never designed to do: undersizing it for the space isn’t a fault, it’s a sizing decision, and no warranty covers a unit that’s simply too small.
The servicing condition nobody reads
Plenty of manufacturer warranties are conditional on the unit being maintained, and some ask for documented servicing at set intervals to stay valid on the bigger claims. That means keeping receipts. An informal “yeah, we gave it a clean last spring” is not evidence.
The good news is the routine involved is not onerous, and most of it you can do yourself. Washing filters, keeping the outdoor coil clear of leaf litter and garden growth, checking the drain runs freely. Our air conditioner maintenance routine covers what’s genuinely worth doing and how often. Where a brand requires a licensed technician to do a periodic service, do it and file the invoice somewhere you’ll find it in four years.
What quietly voids it
The clauses that end a claim are mostly about who touched the unit, not what went wrong with it. The ones that come up:
- Unlicensed installation: handling refrigerant is licensed work under the ARCtick scheme, administered by the Australian Refrigeration Council on behalf of the Australian Government. A split or ducted system installed by someone without that licence is both a legal problem and a warranty problem.
- Unlicensed electrical work: hard-wiring a unit, running a dedicated circuit or touching the switchboard is licensed electrician’s work. Energy Safe Victoria and Queensland’s Electrical Safety Office both say the same thing, that DIY electrical work is illegal and hard-wired equipment has to be connected by a licensed electrician. Doing it yourself puts the whole install outside the warranty terms as well.
- Someone else opening the unit: a mate who “had a look at the board” will be visible to a technician later, and it ends the conversation.
- Unregistered product: some brands ask you to register the unit within a set window after installation to get the full warranty term, and miss the window and you can drop back to a shorter default. Whether yours does is in the warranty document that came with it, so read that rather than assuming.
- Moving the unit: relocating a split system to another wall or another house is a new installation, and the original warranty often doesn’t follow it unless a licensed installer does the move and documents it.
A hard-wired split or ducted system needs its own circuit, an isolator and enough spare capacity at the switchboard. If the board has no spare ways, that’s a separate job sitting on top of the aircon quote. Our guide to the electrical side of an aircon install covers what has to happen there.
Your rights don’t stop when the warranty does
A manufacturer’s warranty is an extra promise on top of the law, not a replacement for it. Under the Australian Consumer Law, goods come with automatic consumer guarantees, and the ACCC is explicit that these “are not the same as warranties, including extended warranties” and that “consumer guarantees are automatic and can’t be taken away”.
Any warranty document a business gives you has to carry mandatory wording saying exactly that, and the ACCC requires that no extra information in the document limits or negates it. So if an expired warranty is being used to wave you off a unit that failed far earlier than a reasonable person would expect, that’s worth pushing back on. The ACCC’s own page on consumer guarantees sets out what you’re entitled to and how to raise it.
The practical version
Keep three things in one folder: the installer’s certificate of compliance and invoice, the product registration confirmation, and every service receipt. Ask the installer at quote stage what their workmanship warranty covers and for how long, and get the answer in writing rather than over the phone. Do that, and the warranty conversation stays a five minute one instead of a fortnight of arguing about who’s responsible.
