Air Conditioning in Central Coast

No. Air-conditioning work is specialist work under the Home Building Act 1989, and the dollar threshold that shelters small building jobs is written into the definition of residential building work with the words "other than specialist work" — it never reaches this trade. A $300 installation and a $3,000 one carry the identical requirement. The one thing genuinely outside the licensing net is a self-contained single-phase plug-in domestic unit, which the Regulation excludes by name. Unlicensed contracting carries a maximum penalty NSW states in dollars as $22,000 for an individual and $110,000 for a company, with $55,000 or twelve months' imprisonment available for a second or subsequent offence.

Because the air-conditioning licence only reaches part of the electrical work. The Regulation authorises associated electrical wiring work "relating to the general servicing and maintenance" of a system — testing and diagnosing control and power circuits, disconnecting and reconnecting components designed to be permanently connected, replacing components on the load side of the mains supply, and minor alterations to wiring. Running a new circuit for a new installation is not general servicing and maintenance; it is electrical wiring work, which is separately licensed specialist work with no dollar threshold of its own. Some contractors hold both categories and some subcontract the electrical side, but the work has to be done by someone licensed for it either way.

Possibly more than one, and it is not worth asserting a single answer. The Regulation lists air-conditioning work and refrigeration work as separate specialist categories, and the Act separately defines mechanical services and medical gas work to include the installation, commissioning and incidental design work associated with "any part of a single head split system", a ceiling cassette system, or an add-on condenser unit for a ducted system. A licence in any of them is a contractor licence in a specialist category, and the practical rule is the same in each case: licensed at any value. The useful question to ask is not which category the job falls in but which categories the licence in front of you actually carries, which the public register returns.

In a home, yes; outside one, not necessarily. The Regulation's description of the air-conditioning category expressly excludes "the installation, maintenance or repair of ducting or insulation in premises other than a dwelling", and NSW's own licensing page states it directly: a licence is not required to do duct work outside of a dwelling. Inside a dwelling, ducting is part of the licensed category. The same description also excludes work on cooling-tower drift eliminators, treatment of cooling or heating water and cleaning of cooling towers — commercial-scale items that rarely arise on a house, but they are the reason the category's boundaries read the way they do.

There is, where the committee is exercising the owners corporation's power under s 110. The Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 provides that an approval is taken to be given if an owner requests one and the strata committee has not, within three months of receiving the request, both refused it and given reasons for the refusal. The Act also states that approval for minor renovations "cannot be unreasonably withheld", and requires the owners corporation to keep a record of minor renovations for ten years. None of that removes the notice requirements in s 110(4), including details of who is carrying out the work and their qualifications, so the three months runs from a complete request rather than an informal one.