Abstract In recent years, the growing needs for fulfilling the comfort cooling requirements with efficient refrigerating and air conditioning systems have gained impetus. In this work, the performance of a combined variable refrigerant volume (VRV) and cool thermal energy storage (CTES) air conditioning (A/C) system was experimentally investigated for summer and winter design conditions. Experimental results suggest that the VRV-CTES A/C system (combined A/C system) precisely maintained the indoor temperature at 24 °C for year-round operational conditions. The PCM being applied has exhibited good latent heat capacity (~160.81 kJ kg −1 ) with congruent phase transition characteristics (~9.92 °C), even after 1000 repeated thermal cycles. Furthermore, the reduced cooling capacities and reduced combined power consumption were attributed to the improved performance of the combined A/C system. In total, this system would be beneficial in terms of accomplishing comfort cooling needs for conditioning applications without sacrificing energy efficiency.