The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates, “heat pumps globally have the potential to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by at least 500 million tonnes in 2030 – equal to the annual CO2 emissions of all cars in Europe today.”
However the coolants used in many heat pumps available in our area may not be as environmentally friendly as believed.
This problem was brought to Cortes Currents’ attention by Cortes Island resident Ralph Garrison, who explained, “We actually own a house in Victoria because we took our daughter to high school there, bought a ‘junk house,’ fixed it up and put in a heat pump. A year or so later, all the refrigerant disappeared for reasons unknown. The people that installed it came back to put more refrigerant in it and now it has worked for a few years, just fine.’
“I don’t know many people with heat pumps, but I have two friends that have lost all the refrigerant from Daikin heat pumps.”
Cortes Currents reached out to a company distributing Daikin heat pumps on Cortes and Quadra Islands, as well as Campbell River, but this is the weekend and the call was merely forwarded by their answering service.
Most of the of heat pumps, refrigerators and air conditioners sold locally use R-410A, a refrigerant whose global warming potentrial (GWP) is 2,088 times worse than C02.
“It sounds like they maintain their refrigerant for many years. So that’s great as long as this refrigerant doesn’t leak, but my guess, and this is just my guess, is that at some point in the life of the equipment, there’ll be a failure,” said Garrison.
According to the Green Building Advisor, “If the 3 to 4 pounds of R-410A in a small ductless heat pump system were to escape into the atmosphere, it would cause as much warming as a gasoline car’s annual emissions.”
After studying 528 heat pump installations made by 6 different companies, the British firm Eunomia concluded that about 10% of domestic heat pumps leak every year. For the most part these are minor leaks, but they did find 34 ‘catastrophic leaks’ in which 46-50% of the fluid was lost. There were either no problems, or only relatively minor leaks, with roughly 93.5% of the units they examined. Eunomia’s report was published close to a decade ago, but they were aware that R-410A has a GWP of 2,088 and advised the UK to adopt this technology.
“The levels of emissions from leakage, however, are small relative to the total emissions reductions which might be delivered by heat pump technologies via the displacement of fossil fuelled heating alternatives.”
One home service company listed the possible causes of leaks and ways to fix them:
- A faulty installation
- A clogged drain line (which needs to be cleaned).
- The evaporator coil may be dirty and unable to handle the condensation (which could have been prevented by scheduling routine HVAC maintenance).
- A crack in the overflow pan (buy a new one a.s.a.p.)
- A frozen evaporator coil (needs immediate repair).
Image credit: Refrigerants – photo by Лобачев Владимир (own work) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
On January 1, 2020, the European Union banned its use of R-410A in new heat pumps. Further restrictions are coming in 2025. This includes a prohibition of all refrigerant gasses with a global warming potential (GWP) higher than 750.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency states that no residential and commercial air conditioning equipment using R-410A can be built after January 1, 2025 or sold after January 1, 2026.
On December 21, 2021, Daikin announced the release of “The new Daikin ATMOSPHERA system featuring R-32 refrigerant from Daikin North America.” It is “a single zone, ductless system that gains impressive efficiencies over its R-410A predecessor line, the LV Series,”
R-32 was formerly given a GWP rating of 675, which Daikin states is “one-third the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of the most common refrigerants currently being used in the United States and Canada.”
“Only 700 times worse, at least that’s better,” responded Garrison. “I have contacted a couple of companies in Washington state, where these things are actually being sold, to see if I could buy one there and then have the local Daikin representatives install it here. I haven’t really nailed that down. Of course, I’m still disturbed by this 750 times CO2. Somewhere out in the world, they have heat pumps that use a much lower global warming potential.”
“Propane is one of them. I saw butane is another one that’s in refrigerators and even CO2, which is equivalent of 1 instead of 750.”
Searching through the net, Cortes Currents discovered that propane is not considered a greenhouse gas because it is so quickly neutralised by sunlight. The global warming potential rating for heat pumps using propane used to be 3%, but a new study shows that the GWP for both propane and butane is only a fraction of a percent.
Prior to the IPCC report ‘Climate Change 2021,’ R-32 met the EU requirement that new heat pumps must have a GWP level of 750 or lower. R-32 is now rated at 771, which means that after 2025 there will most likely be no new heat pumps using it built in Europe or the United States.
European standards have become more stringent. As of 2027 there will be no sales of new heat pumps whose refrigerants have a rating higher than 150, and in 2032 this restriction will become a total ban.
“I wish that the government would take it seriously try to figure these things out and have reasonable goals about how to get to a climate friendly place. It seems like the governments are just sticking their heels in the ground and getting dragged along by the rest of us. We’re left to make personal choices about how we react to this climate crisis and it’s difficult to calculate these things on a personal level,” said Garrison.
The David Suzuki Foundation compares the emissions from a flight to Europe with those of the average gasoline powered car over the course of a year.
“My wife Maureen and I decided to stop flying, even though we see people around us flitting all over the place and I’m missing it.”
“When our daughter graduated from secondary school in Victoria, they had a graduation ceremony and each student had like two sentences worth of what they are going to do in the near future. Are they going to university? Are they going to trade school? I would say 75% of them had a bunch of international travel, meaning a bunch of flying, in their immediate future. A lot of them were taking a gap year in order to see the world.”
“I just think how ubiquitous this travel bug is. I’m 72 and as a child, our family thought that travel, especially international travel was something to aspire to. That made you a better person in some ill defined way. On one level, I can see it as being just incredibly self indulgent, and that’s part of our culture too.”
Firewood has been the primary heating source on Cortes Island for generations. Many people are switching to heat pumps for environmental reasons.
“I don’t know how to weigh it, except I have my own inertia. We use wood heat here and I enjoy the whole wood heat ritual. I’ve done it all my adult life. I have my little chainsaw with its polluting gas engine and I go out and cut my firewood. It’s kind of part of the culture and I like it. So I’m reluctant to give it up without something that is clearly better.”
Top image credit: Heat pump installed at one Cortes Island residence (The white dots are snow) – Roy L Hales photo
Sign-up for Cortes Currents email-out:
To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:
- Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
- Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
We had a Mitsubishi heat pump professionally installed, and I was surprised to learn that the coolant in the pipes between the outside pump and indoor air handler runs at 600psi, which is about ten times the pressure in most water systems, and 6 times the pressure in most air compressor systems. I would hesitate to install a mini-split heat pump myself, which will require making high-pressure connections, for this reason alone.
Using a heat pump in BC doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions much, since nearly all our electricity is from hydro power, not fossil fuels. But it does reduce the Hydro bill, which is the primary motive for installing one. But today it’s -10C and our heat pump is working incredibly hard to extract heat from that cold air, so we are hanging around near the toasty warm wood stove.
We had a Daikin heat pump installed a year and a half ago. Prior to that our #1 heat source was firewood (whose emissions I hear are comparable to coal), so I guess we have made a step forward in terms of reducing emissions.
It is difficult for me to compare the cost of using baseboard heaters to a heat pump because I have not relied on baseboard heaters for years. BC Hydro states baseboard heater are UP TO 300% more efficient https://www.bchydro.com/powersmart/residential/tips-technologies/heat-pumps.html – which means less expensive.
We used the wood stove last night, because it was so cold and wood is so much better when it comes to heating the whole house. I agree with your word ‘toasty.’ As I only use wood during power outages and cold snaps, our current supply may last for years.
At some point I want to get some more expert opinion re the leakage/emissions question, as my sole purpose for switching to a heat pump was reducing our emissions.
Hi Roy,
I am giving you a different perspective to Ralph’s article.
I worked out some calculations to compare emissions from heat pumps versus a car. Both are convenience items. We have a heat pump and love it. I was trying to determine whether or not I should be alarmed after reading Ralph’s article.
Our heat pump is a Daikin and it uses 1.45 kgs of the refrigerant R410a.
image0.jpeg
Using several conversion factors I was able convert the 1.45 kg to a gaseous quantity of 219 litres. And applying a GWP factor of 1890, this amounted to 414,000 litres equivalency to CO2.
Some sources quote a GWP of 2088.
An average car emits 2.5 million litres of CO2 emissions over the year ( 50 kms per day, 22 mpg ).
Therefore a catastrophic loss of all refrigerant would be equivalent to driving for (414,000/ 2,500,000) x 12 months = 2 months or 60 days.
Assuming there is no catastrophic loss of coolant, the standard annual emission from a heat pump is 4%, equating to the equivalent of 2.4 days of driving, or driving 120 km.
Over the 15 year lifespan of a heat pump, these annual leakages would amount to 60% of the coolant. It is estimated that decommissioning a unit results in a further loss of 15%. Total loss over the lifetime is 75% of coolant, which be equivalent to 45 days of driving over a 15 yr span, or three days of driving per year.
I think this puts in to perspective that although refrigerant is very bad, so are cars, and we hardly blink at the thought of jumping into our car to drive to somewhere.
The heat pump offers a tremendous convenience to us and certainly reduces the wood we burn. Our consumption dropped from four cords to 1.75 cords. This keeps trees in the forest and working to recycle carbon dioxide.
I’m going to have to divide this into long term and short term answers.
Long term, heat pumps using R-410A are at best a transitional technology. They will soon (2025) be phased out in Europe and the United States is not far behind (no sales of new appliances as of 2026). Canada appears to be lagging behind. As you see in the article above, I’m told Daikin’s replacement (R-32) won’t make the new 750 GWP limit either and beyond that a new 150 GWP limit is coming in.
So I do not know how long we will be able to use our current heat pumps.
Agreed our heat pumps are better than firewood, natural gas or any fossil fuel technology – I’m not sure it is better than baseboards (which are primarily using electricity produced by hydro).
As long as there are not catastrophic leaks (which do occur) our heat pumps are a good thing. So how often do catastrophic leaks occur? (Am I going to have one?) When I wrote the article above, I was relying on an old but much quoted study from the UK.
Long term, we are eventually going to have to upgrade to meet the new 150 GWP standards. This is also a good thing, for the environment. I find I need to replace my computer every – is it 5 or 6 years? I would be surprised if we can use Daikins using R-410A after 2030. How long after 2025 will we be able to use them?
If we were able to switch now, my only (personal) hesitation would be not wanting to buy into another ‘lemon.’ (I actually like lemons and do not know why they are used in illustrations of this kind.) Beyond that, in our household it would have to be an agreed upon solution.