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.
The sharpest finding in the EPREL snapshot is not a refrigerant crossover; it is the size of the gap between the headline claim and the underlying declaration data. In the normalized refrigerant reference, R32 still dominates with 13,935 listings, while R290 appears only 537 times — or 540 if you fold in the small spelling variants R290A and R290a. That puts propane-coded entries at roughly 3.27% of the natural-refrigerant slice and well under 1% of the full 60,989-model universe.
That mismatch matters because the transition signal is real, but it is still early. EPREL’s reference table assigns GWP 0 to R290, versus 771 for R32, with an F-gas phase-out date of 2027-01-01 for R32. The policy direction is obvious; the live catalog composition is not yet catching up. See the live canonical analysis here: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/europe-2026-r290-overtakes-r32-in-heat-pump-listings
From a data-engineering angle, the important part is source structure. This dataset is built from the EPREL Public API, with refrigerant strings normalized against the refrigerants reference and compared to the market index snapshot. That matters because the raw declared strings can mislead if you count aliases without consolidation.
The same snapshot also shows where the market is concentrated. Daikin Europe N.V. alone accounts for 14,668 models; Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. has 5,575; and Johnson Controls Hitachi has 5,207. A refrigerant shift at scale will likely come from a few large portfolios, not the long tail of 777 manufacturers.
Country economics add another layer. Eurostat-based electricity-to-gas ratios are strongest in Sweden (1.30), the Netherlands (1.49), France (1.78), and Italy (2.00), while Germany (3.16) and the UK (4.63) are less favorable. But the corpus does not include country-level refrigerant adoption, so that remains a hypothesis, not a measured split.
For the full, reproducible breakdown with live data tables and filters, read the full analysis with live data.
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/europe-2026-r290-overtakes-r32-in-heat-pump-listings.
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