Cooling matters less here — heating is the real story
Edinburgh summers are short and the haar does a fair bit of the cooling for you, so we won't pretend Musselburgh is Marbella. That said, some homes here genuinely do overheat: top-floor tenement flats directly under a slate roof, south-facing New Town drawing rooms behind tall glass, and newer flats around Leith with plenty of glazing and not much cross-ventilation. For a few weeks most summers, those rooms are miserable.
The stronger argument is winter. A modern split-system air conditioner is a reversible air-to-air heat pump: it heats as well as cools, and it delivers several units of heat for each unit of electricity it uses. For a hard-to-heat room in an old stone building — a home office, a cold bedroom above a pend — that can be the cheapest way to add controllable heat without touching the radiators. Our guide to heating a room cheaply with air-to-air works through it properly. One honest note: government heat pump grants are generally aimed at air-to-water systems that replace a boiler, not air-to-air units, so don't count on a grant for this.
Tenements, listed stock and the New Town question
This is the part Edinburgh owners already suspect: it's complicated here. Much of the city centre sits within conservation areas, and the New Town and Old Town are full of listed buildings. An external condenser unit on a listed or conservation-area building needs checking with the council before anything is fixed to a wall — we won't tell you it will be fine, because sometimes it won't be. Rear elevations and enclosed courts are usually the realistic options.
Tenement living adds its own layer. External walls and common areas are shared, so check your title deeds and speak to your co-owners or factor before committing to anything. Flats almost always need that consent, whatever the building's age.
Older wiring is common too. Many tenement flats will want an electrical inspection first, and some need a consumer unit upgrade before an installer will connect anything. As for cost, we'd rather not pluck figures out of the air for a city we're not installing in yet — our UK air conditioning cost guide explains what drives the price and what a fair quote looks like.
Where Coolhouse is up to in Edinburgh
Straight answer: our vetted installers are currently in Hertfordshire, not Edinburgh. We're building our network here, and we'd rather say that plainly than promise a survey we can't deliver this week. If you leave your details and a rough idea of what you're after, we'll tell you honestly where we've got to and match you as local installers come on board. Early interest from Edinburgh, Leith and Musselburgh genuinely shapes where we go next.