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 signal in the 2026 EPREL-style snapshot is not a clean refrigerant winner — it’s a data-coverage gap. The corpus does not expose a Europe-wide or country-level SCOP cross-tab for R290 vs R32, so any headline claiming a definitive efficiency gap would be overstated. What the dataset does show is a dramatic asymmetry in catalog presence: R32 appears on 13,935 models, while R290 shows up on 537. Out of 60,989 total listed models, that leaves natural refrigerants at just 3.27% of the catalog.
That matters because the market is still being shaped by product mix, not just chemistry. The overall universe spans 777 manufacturers, with an average SCOP of 4.55 and average rated power of 9.3 kW. By segment, air-water systems dominate with 30,452 models at 4.54 SCOP, while ground-water reaches 4.77 and water-water climbs to 6.15 — a reminder that refrigerant comparisons need tight controls for type and application.
The country economics layer is where small efficiency deltas become commercially meaningful. On the supplied tariff table, Romania has the highest electricity-to-gas ratio at 5.11, followed by the United Kingdom at 4.63 and Belgium at 3.9; at the other end, Sweden sits at 1.3 and the Netherlands at 1.49. A 0.2-point SCOP difference has very different payback implications across those markets.
Methodologically, the key limitation is reproducibility: the provided snapshot includes market_index_snapshot, type_efficiency, and price_ratio, but no country-by-refrigerant SCOP table and no populated top_models output for either refrigerant. That means the real analytical story is about what can be measured cleanly versus what still needs a cross-tab. Read the full analysis with live data at https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/europe-2026-country-efficiency-gap-r290-r32.
If you need the underlying slices, the canonical post includes the market index, country comparison, and pricing context. Read the full analysis with live data here: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/europe-2026-country-efficiency-gap-r290-r32
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-country-efficiency-gap-r290-r32.
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