Every price range on Know Your Quote comes from sources we can name, and every price table tells you when we checked it. This page explains where our numbers come from, what a range needs before we publish it, and what we do when the data isn’t good enough.
Read it before you hold one of our figures up against a quote, so you know how much weight to give it.
Where our numbers come from
We draw on five kinds of sources, and we don’t treat them equally.
- Installers who publish their own prices. Package pages from local installers that list what’s included for a given house size or system. These carry the most weight, because they show what a real business is willing to charge in writing.
- Retailers. Equipment prices, and supply-and-install prices where a retailer publishes both. They show how much of a quote is the unit and how much is labour.
- Government and independent bodies. The Australian Energy Regulator and Victoria’s Essential Services Commission for electricity tariffs, Sustainability Victoria for running-cost comparisons, and energyrating.gov.au for efficiency data. We use these for anything regulated or measured.
- Cost guides on comparison sites. Canstar Blue, Finder, SolarQuotes and similar. We use them to cross-check a range, never as the only support for one.
- Quotes homeowners share in public. Threads on Whirlpool Forums and Reddit where people post what they were actually quoted. We label these as user-reported every time, because nobody has verified them. They’re also often the most honest picture of what installers charge in your city.
The three-source rule
We publish a price range only when at least three independent sources support it. Independent means different businesses or organisations, not three pages repeating the same figure.
Sometimes three sources don’t exist. When that happens, we tell you what we used instead. For ducted air conditioning in Brisbane, two local installers published almost identical ranges, and two rounds of searching didn’t turn up a third installer with a published price. A Brisbane homeowner’s real quote landed in the same range, so we published it, and the article explains exactly that.
When the evidence is thinner than that, we don’t publish a number. Some costs, such as replacing a ducted system compared with installing one from scratch, don’t have enough public data behind them yet. Those sections explain what drives the price and what to ask your installer, and stop there.
Every figure has a date
Prices, tariffs and rebates move. We log each figure we cite with its source and the date we captured it, and each price table shows the month we checked it.
Some of these changes run on a schedule. The maximum prices for standard electricity plans (the Default Market Offer set by the AER, and the Victorian Default Offer) reset every 1 July, so the tariffs we quote apply to the current financial year. Rebates change with less warning. Check the scheme’s official page before you count a rebate into your budget.
How we handle sources with an angle
A source can be accurate and still pick the number that suits it best. We read the fine print before we repeat a claim.
An example from our evaporative cooling research: a manufacturer’s brochure says evaporative cooling costs about a tenth as much to run as reverse cycle air conditioning. The figure is real, but the brochure compares it against a 1.5-star, unzoned reverse cycle system, the least efficient setup in the comparison. Against a 3-star system, Sustainability Victoria’s own figures put the gap at about four times. We publish the full range and explain what moves it, rather than the headline number.
We also leave out:
- pages built to sell a rebate, where “rebated” prices mix list prices with campaign discounts;
- cost guides still online from a marketplace that has since closed;
- one-off promotional prices, unless we label them as a sale and use them only to show how a quote splits between equipment and installation.
GST and what a price includes
Prices on this site include GST unless we say otherwise. That’s how Australian businesses quote to consumers, and it’s how you should compare.
Quotes shared on forums often don’t say whether GST is included. When a source doesn’t specify, we don’t assume, and we say so next to the figure.
Check what each price covers, too. A split system price can mean the unit on its own or the unit fitted with pipework, electrical work and drainage. We tell you which one we’re quoting.
Why your quote might not match our ranges
Our ranges describe the market. Your quote describes your house. Roof space access, the number of storeys, a switchboard upgrade, the number of zones and the distance between indoor and outdoor units can all push a job outside a typical range. One homeowner comparing quotes for the same single-storey home was quoted $11,000 for a ducted system with 2 zones and $13,000 with 4.
Use our numbers to ask better questions. If a quote sits well above the range, ask the installer what’s driving it. If it sits well below, ask what it leaves out. And get more than one quote before you commit.
How this site is funded
Know Your Quote is funded by advertising, and some pages may include affiliate links. Our affiliate disclosure explains how that works. No installer, retailer or manufacturer pays to be included in our research or to change a figure, and we don’t pass your details to installers.
Spotted something out of date?
If a price, tariff or rebate on this site no longer matches what you’re seeing, let us know. Tell us where you saw the newer figure. We’ll check it and update the page with a new capture date.