Michael Langley knew that one of his premium double-decker coaches had an air-conditioning problem. The coach itself was built to a high standard, but its HVAC system couldn’t keep both decks comfortable and wasn’t up to the demands of a premium coach business. With two decks to manage, that’s not a detail you can overlook. As the owner of Australia Wide Coaches, Michael runs a fleet where passenger comfort isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a key part of the delivered experience. So when this particular double-decker’s climate control failed to handle the realities of Australian operations, he came to Coachair for a coach air-conditioning solution.
Key Coach Details:
Length: 12.2 metres Passengers: 72 Coach type: Double Deck
A premium coach held back by its climate control.
The coach had been fitted from new with a HVAC system that was never built to handle the extremes of Australian conditions, and it showed. Two decks, two very different thermal loads, and an air conditioning system that wasn’t built for either. In practice, that meant almost no airflow to the lower deck, while the upper deck performed as it should. The system also couldn’t demist the windows, fogging them up in cold or wet weather to the point where the coach became unsafe to drive in winter conditions. On a hot day, the lower deck was unbearably hot. On a cold day, unbearably cold. The result was a coach that spent more time off the road than on it, limited to short trips in mild weather because it couldn’t be relied on to do the job a premium coach needs to do.
Bringing in Coachair’s engineering team.
Michael approached Coachair to find out whether the system could be fixed rather than replaced outright. With in-house design and application engineering based at our Sydney head office, working through the problem with Michael and his team wasn’t a difficult call to make. After a full consultation with Australia Wide Coaches, our engineers landed on a solution built around the Coachair CCC009 climate control system, fitted to both the upper and lower decks. The result is true dual-zone climate control: each deck runs on its own controller, meaning the driver can set the temperature for each level independently. On a coach carrying passengers across two very different spaces, that’s the difference between a system that copes and one that’s genuinely built for the job.
A complete rebuild, deck by deck.
This wasn’t a repair or patch-up job, it was a full coach air conditioning rebuild, because a system that isn’t built for the job doesn’t simply get fixed with a service call. It has to be replaced with one that is. The existing HVAC unit was stripped back to nothing, every electrical component removed and rebuilt from the ground up using Coachair parts throughout: our premium long-life brushless motors, right through to the CCC009 control system itself. It’s the kind of HVAC upgrade that goes well beyond a simple parts swap. Coachair engaged Crystal Cooling to carry out the physical installation, working closely with our engineering team to bring the design to life on the coach.
Tested before it went back on the road.
Once the rebuild was complete, the unit went through validation and performance testing before the coach was handed back to Michael. For a premium coach operator, knowing the HVAC system performs can’t be left to chance; it needs to be proven before passengers are back on board.
Like getting a new coach
Michael’s reaction on getting the coach back said it all. By his own account, it felt like taking delivery of a brand new vehicle, a long way from where the coach had started. “We run a premium product, so when the climate control on this coach wasn’t up to it, that wasn’t something I was prepared to live with. Coachair’s engineers worked through it properly, understood exactly what the coach needed, and gave us a system that treats the upper and lower decks the way they should be treated, as two different jobs. Getting it back felt like taking delivery of a new coach. It’s exactly the standard our passengers expect, and exactly what I expect from a HVAC supplier.” — Michael Langley, Owner, Australia Wide Coaches
Built to keep running.
Projects like this one are why Coachair operates as one of Australia’s leading bus and coach air conditioning specialists, rather than purely as a parts supplier. As a 100% Australian-owned business, our team covers everything from design and engineering through to OE sales, technical support, servicing and spare parts, nationwide, 24/7. It’s the Through Life Support approach that sits behind every bus and coach HVAC system we work on, whether it left our factory or someone else’s. If your fleet’s HVAC system isn’t coping in Australian conditions, our team can tell you honestly whether it’s fixable. Get in touch with our engineering team to talk through what’s possible.