The Current State of Cooling in HVAC
The HVAC industry is constantly going through changes (mostly for the better), moving toward more efficient resources. In 2024, HVAC refrigerant changes are focused on limiting the use of high global warming potential (GWP) hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). As you can infer, reducing GWP HFCs is part of the global effort to move to environmentally beneficial refrigerants. We consider it a natural progression of resources as technology improves, and welcome the growth. We do understand that change isn’t always the easiest and sometimes doesn’t make sense, so lets take a deeper look into what is coming.
Incentivized Changes
Governments are updating legislation to restrict usage of HFCs overall. The American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act aim to reduce HFC production by a significant amount in the next 10 years. The EPA wants less environmentally damaging materials used for new refrigerant in 2024. HFCs unfortunately still include R-410a & R-134a refrigerants. The downside to this is that current homeowners might experience price hikes in service on their units, nudging the end user to upgrade to a more efficient unit.
The Newer Landscape of HVAC Refrigerant
It might be more advantageous for homeowners to consider upgrading their HVAC units in 2024 (depending on the current age, of course). With the shift of refrigerants moving to use R-454b (the replacement for R-410a), older systems are better off being replaced. R-454b has 78% less potential of global warming than its predecessor. It can also work through more extreme temperatures, making it more flexible of a solution.
Challenges That May Arise Moving Forward
As mentioned before, the transition to newer refrigerant means maintaining older systems will become more expensive. Since a majority of units still use R-410a, it will be a while before the price floor goes up. However, after multiple years when R-454b & R-32 become the mainstream solution, most homeowners will find it easier to upgrade their unit altogether. This shift will be better long term for the environment.
Concluding Thoughts
Making the shift to HVAC refrigerant changes in 2024 will certainly cause a little shake up within the industry, but it is much needed. Accounting for the contribution to global warming and the environment, a long term shift felt overdue. The only real downsides are obviously those that will affect current homeowners and the HVAC units they have. Phasing out GWP refrigerants needed to happen eventually, but unfortunately it won’t be the smoothest transition accommodating older units. As you can see from our recent articles, sustainability is a big push within the HVAC ecosystem. The technology has caught up to where we can look for efficiency improvements from our hardware, and it is great we are doing so.
