Oceania Plant Room, Meadowbank

The smallest contract on this list is also the most technical.

Ten thousand dollars of duct liner in the plant room of Oceania's Meadowbank aged care facility, delivered for Argon and completed February 2025. It is the kind of scope that gets treated as a rounding error on a project budget and then causes complaints for the life of the building if it is done poorly.

Duct liner sits inside the HVAC ductwork and on the plant room enclosures, and it does two unrelated jobs at the same time.

The first is acoustic. Plant equipment is loud, and ductwork is an excellent path for carrying that noise straight into the rooms the ducts serve. In an aged care facility those rooms are where residents sleep. Lining the duct absorbs the airborne noise before it travels, which is why the treatment goes inside the duct rather than around the outside of it.

The second is thermal. The liner insulates the duct skin, which controls heat loss and, more importantly in a plant room, controls condensation. A cold duct surface in humid air will sweat, and sweating ductwork above a ceiling becomes a moisture problem that gets blamed on everything except the duct.

Both jobs depend entirely on the install rather than the product. Every seam, every penetration and every fixing has to be sealed correctly. Leave a gap and the acoustic performance drops off, because sound will find the gap, and the thermal performance drops off at the same point, because that is where the condensation forms. There is no partial credit.

We are including a $10,000 job on a page full of contracts fifty times the size because plant room and mechanical services insulation is a genuine specialism, it is regularly handed to whoever is cheapest, and it is regularly done badly.

Signed off without rework.

If you have plant room, duct liner or mechanical services insulation on an aged care or commercial project, this is work we do properly.