Southport Medical Centre: Full VRF Upgrade Across Three Floors

Southport Medical Centre is a multi-specialty private clinic occupying three floors of a commercial building in Southport, Gold Coast. The practice operates 24 consulting rooms, two procedure rooms, administrative offices, a pathology collection area and patient waiting areas across approximately 1,200sqm.

Their existing ducted AC system was 14 years old, increasingly unreliable and generating frequent complaints from both staff and patients about inconsistent temperatures across the building. The practice was also facing rising energy costs and wanted a system that could be individually metered per floor to support a potential future sublease arrangement.

Replacing the entire AC system in an operating medical centre without disrupting patient appointments was the primary constraint. The existing ducted system served the whole building from a single air handler — a full cutover would have required closing the clinic for several days, which was not acceptable to the practice.

Different areas of the clinic had fundamentally different requirements: consulting rooms needed individual temperature control, procedure rooms required stricter temperature and humidity tolerances, and the pathology collection area needed continuous cooling regardless of time of day. The building landlord also required that any new system support flexible zone-by-zone tenancy in the future — a requirement the existing ducted system could not meet.

Shelair proposed a Daikin VRV IV system, allowing each indoor unit to be individually controlled while sharing common outdoor plant — reducing the outdoor equipment footprint versus a split-system-per-room approach. The installation was staged across five weekends, with each floor completed over a single weekend to minimise clinic disruption. All weekday patient services continued without interruption throughout the project.

Existing ceiling penetrations were utilised where practical to reduce make-good costs. New indoor units were specified from Daikin's compact cassette range to fit within the existing ceiling grid. Procedure rooms received individual humidity-sensing controllers with tighter setpoint tolerances; the pathology area was connected to an always-on circuit with a dedicated controller independent of the main building scheduling.

All three floors were commissioned and handed over within the contracted six-week schedule. Temperature variance across the building dropped from the 5–8°C range recorded in staff complaints to within 1–2°C of setpoint in all zones. Based on energy consumption data from the first quarter post-installation, the clinic is projecting a 38% reduction in AC-related electricity costs compared to the equivalent period in the prior year.

The practice manager noted that patient complaints about temperature had effectively stopped — a first in several years. The new system also provides individual floor metering capability, satisfying the landlord's future tenancy requirement without any additional infrastructure work.

Six-week staged installation with zero disruption to weekday patient services. Floor-by-floor Daikin VRV system with individual zone control per room. 38% projected AC energy cost reduction. Stricter humidity and temperature control for procedure rooms and pathology. Individual floor metering for future tenancy flexibility. 5-year Shelair workmanship guarantee across all installed equipment.