Refrigerant Pandemonium: What to do with your old R22 Heating and Cooling Equipment

Before we get to the article: a brief primer about refrigerants.

Refrigerant Bottles

Refrigerants are special compounds that cycle through refrigeration systems including air conditioners and act as a medium of transfer for the heat that is extracted from the cold side of the system (your house or your refrigerator). I won't describe how the refrigeration cycle occurs in these machines - you can look that up on Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that these machines have been around a while (since the 1850s) , and various refrigerant compounds have been invented to act as the medium of transfer inside of them. The first major commercial refrigerants was invented by Dupont in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in R22 - a huge commercial success. Unfortunately all of those millions of tons of r22 that were produced caused a hole in the ozone layer - something that their creators had not anticipated. This environmental crisis caused the world's governments to get together in Montreal in the 70's to sign a pledge to ban and phase out ozone depleting chemicals (CFC's)

So, given the terms of the CFC phase out, if your air conditioner was built before the turn of the milennium, chances are it has r22 as its refrigerant. And now most pieces of r22 equipment are at least 20 years old, many are much older, and plenty are failing.

Last year was a banner year for our customers changing out R22 equipment, not because r22 systems are failing in ways that are not repairable, but primarily because the cost of refrigerant is driving repair costs to the point where that money would be better spent on new equipment. It is a bit like having a lovely old 1990 Mercedes in the driveway with a dead transmission. You might spend half the value of the car on a repair, so even though the car is great, and repairable, you probably scrap it anyway.

The units we are replacing r22 equipment with have up to now had r410a as the refrigerant, and it has been fine since the turn of the millennium, but it has a very high global warming potential, more than 2000 times more than CO2, so we are getting ready to phase it out too. We are still buying, selling, installing, and recharging these systems. And the chemical companies will be producing the refrigerant for quite a while to come. But, the generation of refrigerants to replace r410a are already hitting the market in the USA, and will be sold in Canada in the next year.

The new generation of refrigerants (r32 and r454) are formulated to have less of an impact on the greenhouse effect than r410a did, but in order to achieve that, they are slightly more flammable (just barely) than r410a. And because of this flammability, they new machines have to be built with leak detectors inside them. They will shut themselves off in the case of a leak.

So should you install an R410a system, or wait until the next wave of refrigerants hits?

From our perspective, it makes sense to install R410a equipment because our manufacturers are saying that the equipment with the new refrigerants will be at least 25% more costly than the old equipment without being any more efficient than the r410a stuff. There are some other considerations, but we can help answer the question if you get in touch, but it really depends on what kind of equipment you are installing.