For most of the time the Lower Mainland has been built out, air conditioning was a luxury item here. Houses were designed for mild summers, and a great many of them have no cooling at all, no ductwork suitable for it, and west-facing glazing that made perfect sense when August topped out at 24°C.
Summers changed faster than the housing stock did. Here are the options, ranked honestly — including the ones that are not our business.
First: the things that cost nothing
We are an HVAC company telling you to try the free options first. They genuinely work, and they change what equipment you subsequently need.
Close blinds on the sun side before it gets hot, not after. Stopping solar gain at the glass is dramatically more effective than removing the heat afterwards. External shading — an awning, a tree, even a temporary screen — beats internal blinds by a wide margin because it stops the energy before it enters.
Purge at night. Open up when the outside temperature drops below inside, close up in the morning. On a typical Lower Mainland night this still works; during a genuine heat dome it stops working, which is precisely why heat domes are dangerous.
Turn off what makes heat. Ovens, incandescent lighting, a computer running all day in a small room.
Doing these properly can take several degrees off a house. They also reduce the cooling load, which means smaller and cheaper equipment when you do install some.
Option 1: Portable and window units
Cost: low. Disruption: none. How much it helps: one room, adequately.
Worth being clear-eyed about. A portable unit vents hot air out a window through a hose, and the window kit leaks. Single-hose units also draw air from the room, creating negative pressure that pulls warm air in from elsewhere in the house.
They work for a bedroom. They are not a house solution, they are noisy, and they are expensive to run for the cooling they deliver. But if the problem is “I cannot sleep in July”, one in the bedroom is a real answer and it costs a fraction of anything else here.
Many strata buildings restrict window units. Check before buying.
Option 2: Ductless mini-splits
Cost: moderate. Disruption: low. How much it helps: genuinely, in the zones you install it.
This is the answer for most houses here without ductwork, and it is the one we install most often for exactly that reason.
An outdoor unit connects to one or more indoor heads via a small refrigerant line through the wall. No ducting. Each head is its own zone with its own control, so you can cool the bedrooms and the living room and not the spare room nobody uses.
They also heat, efficiently, which means you are buying a year-round appliance rather than a summer one. In a house with electric baseboards, replacing the main zones with mini-splits frequently improves winter running costs as well as solving summer.
The trade-off is visible indoor heads. Some people mind; most stop noticing within a month.
Placement matters more than people expect, and it is where installs go wrong — we see call-backs for heads mounted where the airflow fights the room. Worth asking any installer to walk the rooms rather than quoting from a floor plan.
Option 3: Central heat pump on existing ductwork
Cost: higher. Disruption: moderate. How much it helps: whole house.
If you already have ducted gas heating, a heat pump can use that ductwork to cool the whole house — and heat it more efficiently for most of the year.
Two constraints to check first. The ductwork must be able to move the airflow a heat pump needs, which is more than a furnace needs; and your electrical panel must have the capacity, which on older 100A services is not a given. Both are covered properly in do heat pumps actually work in Lower Mainland winters and will your electrical panel take a heat pump.
This is also the option the rebate programs point at most strongly, though as always the incentive should not choose the equipment.
Option 4: Ducted retrofit
Cost: highest. Disruption: highest. How much it helps: whole house, properly.
Adding ductwork to a house that never had it. Realistically this only makes sense as part of a larger renovation — while walls and ceilings are already open. Standalone, mini-splits get you most of the benefit for far less money and mess.
What we would actually suggest
For a typical Burnaby or Surrey house with no cooling and no ducting: shading and night purge first, then mini-splits in the two or three rooms that matter. That combination handles ordinary summers comfortably and makes a heat dome survivable, which is the real design target now.
For a house with existing gas ducted heating: a heat pump on the existing ducts, subject to the airflow and panel checks.
For a rental, a strata unit, or a tight budget this year: a decent unit in the bedroom, and the free measures taken seriously.
We install air conditioning and mini-splits across the Lower Mainland from our Surrey showroom, and we would rather tell you that shading and a bedroom unit solves your problem than sell you a system you did not need.