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.
R290 is still a minority in Europe’s declared heat-pump corpus, but the bigger story is no longer adoption — it’s pricing structure. In the latest Househeating Pulse snapshot, propane appears in 537 EPREL-listed models versus 13,935 R32 models, so R290 is only about 3.9% as common as R32. That gap matters because the refrigerant transition has already split into two separate questions: who ships propane at all, and who prices it like a mainstream option.
The market-wide data is readable, but brand-level affordability is still the missing layer. The canonical analysis on househeating-pulse.com/articles/europe-2026-r290-price-premium-by-brand shows why the obvious next step is a matched R290-vs-R32 price ratio per manufacturer — but also why that ratio cannot be derived from the current corpus alone. The available tables expose model counts, refrigerant declarations, and brand shares, yet not the matched list-price fields needed for a defensible premium calculation.
That makes scale the best proxy for now. Daikin Europe N.V. leads the snapshot with 14,668 models and 24.05% share, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. at 5,575 models (9.14%) and Johnson Controls Hitachi at 5,207 (8.54%). Bosch Thermotechnik sits at 3,602 models, while Ariston reaches 2,618. The top 10 brands together account for 60.93% of all listed models, so any refrigerant pricing strategy from that cohort can move the market.
The regulatory backdrop keeps the pressure on: R290 is listed as a natural refrigerant with GWP 0 and no phase-out date, while R32 carries GWP 771 and a 2027-01-01 phase-out date in the refrigerants reference. For developers and data engineers, the key takeaway is simple: refrigerant labels are easy to slice in EPREL, but price premiums still require reproducible brand-level joins that aren’t in the public snapshot yet.
Read the full analysis with live data at the canonical article, and use the live tables there to track how brand pricing shifts as more EPREL data lands.
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-price-premium-by-brand.
