How can I ensure there are no aircon costs outside of the quote?
We did a project for Dennis Pagan in Travencore towers on the ground floor. The tenancy has a lot of west and south facing glass which meant we were going to have heat loss in winter, and heat gain summer.
The client was comparing two competitive quotes, ourselves and another provider. When Dennis did the comparison between the quotes, we had provided two 22 kilowatt units, totalling 44 kilowatts of heating and cooling capacity. The competitors quote had provided for 20 kilowatts of air conditioning capacity, less than half of the requirement. The client would assume, looking at the two proposals, their websites and the types of work they each do and have done for other clients, that the two quotes would be on a par. In fact, there had been a massive under specification, which gave the competitor a huge competitive advantage over our quote in terms of cost.
This is the sort of thing we double check on. If the air conditioning is inadequate for the space, you have spent all that money fitting out something unusable, and will have to spend money after the fact, which is much more expensive, messy and disruptive for staff.
Another project in Keilor Road, Essendon that we transformed for an accounting firm, had a similar issue. The other company that we were competing against was one of their clients.
The client said to us, unfortunately you’re $20,000 over budget. We’re going to go with our client who we have a prior relationship with. Thank you and goodbye. We asked if we could sit down and just review the quotes. We are good sports. First item on the exclusions page said; ‘excludes any air- conditioning- $85,000’. A 600sqm tenancy and no air conditioning provision. I asked the client, ‘do you want air conditioning?’. He was gobsmacked because a reasonable person would assume that a design & build team would be providing the air conditioning necessary to be compliant and do the job.
A pitfall around air conditioning is that some systems are designed to work to as low as five degrees for heating and a maximum 35 degrees for cooling. What does that mean outside that operating range? When it’s really cold, the system sits on de-ice and doesn’t warm up and your staff complain. Or when it’s a heat wave, it’s not working because it was only ever designed to operate at a maximum temperature of 35 degrees.
This is why it is so important to ensure there are no hidden costs. You don’t want to be out for extra equipment because it was underspecified by the fitout team.
For your next project, we’d love to help you go through your requirements and associated costing to ensure everything’s covered for you. We can help you get it right the first time to allow your team to grow and serve your customers well so you can be your best at work and get a return on investment.
Some other videos in this series that you may be interested in:
Why do other fitout companies have a page of exclusions?
How do I know how much to allow for my Fitout budget?
How can the 150K write-off benefit us?
How can I maximise my tax write-off?
Do we need an insurance policy to cover ICON INTERIORS project completion?