Short read. This is a ~300-word brief based on the full analysis at Househeating Pulse. For the interactive charts, brand-level data, and source tables, open the original.
Austria now looks like Europe’s clearest propane-first heat-pump market: the catalog has tipped past 90% R290, with R32 reduced to a single-digit remainder. The interesting part is no longer whether the refrigerant transition happened, but how unevenly it landed across brands. For a reproducible view, the full breakdown sits in the EPREL-derived catalog and market index on househeating-pulse.com, with the slice defined by Austria listings, refrigerant code, and manufacturer.
Two numbers explain why the shift matters operationally. First, Austria’s household energy prices put electricity at €0.3272/kWh and gas at €0.1221/kWh, a 2.68x ratio. That is comfortably below the rough 3.7x breakeven line often used for a heat pump with SCOP 4 versus a gas boiler. Second, Austria is not just “less bad” than Europe on costs — it is structurally favorable enough that propane can become the default spec without needing exotic performance assumptions.
The European baseline makes Austria’s position look even more unusual. Across the wider Market Index, R32 still accounts for 13,935 models, while R290 is listed at 537 and natural refrigerants overall are only 3.27% of the catalog. In other words, Austria is not tracking the continent; it is moving ahead of it.
Brand structure is where the signal gets sharper. The full EPREL aggregation shows the scale leaders as Daikin Europe N.V. (14,668 models), Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. (5,575), and Johnson Controls Hitachi (5,207), with Bosch Thermotechnik (3,602), Ariston (2,618), and Vaillant (1,195) also in the top tier. That scale matters because the propane transition is being carried by manufacturers with deep lineups and broad dealer coverage — except for one holdout that still leans on older refrigerants.
If you care about source traceability, policy alignment, and how refrigerant mix maps to market structure, read the full analysis with live data at https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/austria-2026-r290-share-brand-shift.
Househeating Pulse aggregates 60,000+ EPREL-registered heat-pump models across Europe — efficiency rankings, refrigerant trends, country-level installed prices and subsidies. Data from EPREL, Eurostat, NASA POWER. Full analysis at https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/austria-2026-r290-share-brand-shift.
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