You Have More Room Than the Old Cylinder Needed
Como’s character housing went up in the 1950s and 1960s on large blocks, and the setback they left down the side is why the shortlist here starts wider than on a tight lot. Putting a cylinder back where the last one stood is not the only compliant answer. It’s the answer the previous plumber inherited.
Room is what puts an alternative on the table. A heat pump can stand clear of the wall on a side like this, with somewhere for its condensate to run. A continuous flow unit hands the footprint back to you altogether.
Our plumber takes that setback measurement first, because the shortlist follows from the number.
Can the Pool or the Spa Run Off This Upgrade?
It’s the question these blocks produce, and the answer has two halves.
The half that is no: one appliance will not do both duties. Taps and showers draw in short bursts at a controlled temperature, while a pool or a spa asks for a large volume held warm for hours. A system sized to your morning has nothing spare for that, and one sized to the pool would serve the house badly.
The useful half is yes. What the two loads share is the supply behind them. Where a changeover brings a heavier gas line, a different meter or a new circuit down the side of the house, that work happens once. Our plumber can size it for what a pool or spa heater would later draw, instead of opening that ground twice.
So say the pool is there. The heater is its own appliance and its own order; the gas line, the water connections and the position it needs are hot water and gas fitting work, and that half is MCN’s.
MCN Plumbing Perth and the Second Job on the Same Visit
MCN Plumbing Perth has answered to one owner since 2015, and Milad Nasr’s rule on a job like this is that a wider scope earns its place before it reaches the quote. Whatever brand ends up on the wall, Rheem, Rinnai, Vulcan, Bosch and AquaMax among them, MCN works across the lot. Our plumber prices the changeover and any supply work as separate lines, so you can take one and leave the other. Read our hot water systems page for the licences, the insurance and each guarantee by name.
A Wider Job Does Not Have to Be a Slower One
Adding supply work to a changeover is not urgent, and MCN’s same-day service guarantee takes booked jobs of exactly that kind. 10:30am is where it draws the line: a call arriving before then buys that day, whether you are booking a dead cylinder or the spa run you have meant to sort out since summer.
A cylinder letting go beside a Como house empties onto a garden. Two floors up in a flat it reaches the ceiling below instead. Neither waits for opening hours, so somebody at MCN Plumbing Perth is on call at three in the morning on a public holiday as readily as at nine on a Tuesday.
Here the House Picks the Fuel, Not What’s Available
On plenty of Perth addresses the first question is what the property can actually get. Here it isn’t. Local providers install and service heat pumps, gas and electric systems right across Como, character streets and flats alike, so availability settles nothing and the building does the choosing. Close to 15,000 people live here, families in the houses and students and professionals in the flats, so the right capacity changes across a few streets even where the fuel doesn’t.
Our plumber reads the position first and lets it name the fuel, rather than the other way round. MCN works across the makes and holds no manufacturer’s agency, so what shortens your list is the wall and the room beside it.
A Balcony Position Reverses Every One of Those Answers
The apartments here have gone in since the early 1990s, putting the unit into an internal cupboard or a balcony position where clearance decides the model before capacity comes up. A compact instantaneous unit or a small storage cylinder is what fits, and its flue termination and relief drainage have to suit what the building already carries.
The person booking changes too. Owners and agents running lots here open a job through our service for agents and property managers, since a tenant reporting a cold shower can authorise none of it.
When the Position Comes Into the Job
Nothing widens on a repair. An element, a thermostat, a gas control valve or an ignition assembly comes out and goes back with the unit still standing where it is, the ground beneath untouched.
What forces the job open is narrow and known. A tank losing water through its own wall rather than at a fitting. A heat exchanger past rebuilding. A model whose parts nobody still makes. Any one of those, and the position joins the appliance in the scope.
That position answers to AS/NZS 3500, the standard fixing what a heated water service must satisfy before a plumber hands it over, and it gives your wall no credit for the units already carried. Our plumber re-measures the lot: distance to the boundary, distance to the nearest window or door, where the flue can end, where relief water goes.
Delivered temperature is the installer’s duty, never the manufacturer’s. A regulated maximum attaches the moment a system goes in new or changes position, governing the water that reaches the shower, the bath and the handbasin. Our plumber fits the device holding it under that figure, then proves the result at those outlets. Hot water is licensed plumbing work from the connections in to the sign-off, and a gas unit adds a gasfitting licence; the tradesperson MCN sends to a Como address holds both, insured throughout.
Put four answers on paper before you authorise anything, line by line, not across the whole job:
- Which system type and which fuel
- The exact spot it will stand in, and whether that spot still meets current requirements
- Everything the change drags behind it: flue route, relief discharge, gas line, circuit, strata approval on a flat
- The parts of the work the workmanship guarantee covers
Pipework running out to a pool goes under lawn where nobody looks again, so put that last question to the buried run instead of the box on the wall. MCN offers 100% guaranteed results across all of our work, and a buried run is where that promise earns its keep. Widening a scope is where a second invoice likes to hide, and MCN’s upfront pricing guarantee closes that off: what our plumber quotes for the changeover, and what he quotes for the supply work, are both what you pay.
Approval Only Enters When the Street Can See It
You don’t have to work out which council covers your street before booking. Como answers to the City of South Perth throughout, with no second authority anywhere in it.
The City only has something to decide once the work alters what the property shows the road. Swap a cylinder in the position it already holds, invisible from the footpath, and no approval question opens. Lift a collector onto a pitch the street looks at, or cut a flue through a front wall, and that is the City’s question before it is a plumber’s. In the apartment stock the building’s own approval reaches that view too, and it can refuse on its own.
Which Side of the Meter the Fault Is On
Open the cold tap over that basin. A cold side behaving as it always has, against a hot side giving you nothing, puts the fault on your own pipework. That is ours, either as a hot-water repair or as wider plumbing work at your Como address. Poor cold as well, or coloured water anywhere in the house, puts the cause upstream of your boundary connection, where the Water Corporation carries it.
Gas answers to neither check. Smell it near the unit and the house empties before anyone starts looking, the call to the gas network operator’s emergency number happens from the footpath, and our gasfitter picks the appliance up once the network hands the site back.
What to Say Before Anyone Orders a Unit
One line decides how wide this job is, so tell us on 0418 871 934 whether a pool or a spa is part of what you want heated. The same line reaches info@mcnplumbingperth.com.au, or the form on this site. Say it before anyone chooses the unit, because that’s where our plumber can size the supply once for both. If the answer is no, the Como quote stays one appliance wide, and he’ll say so, not sell you room you have no use for.
0418 871 934
