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 is not an efficiency gap — it is a data availability gap. In the 2026 EPREL snapshot used by Househeating Pulse, R32 is everywhere and R290 is still a niche slice: 13,935 R32 listings versus 537 R290 listings out of 60,989 total heat-pump models, or 22.85% vs 0.88% of the catalog. That is roughly a 26:1 split, which matters more for searchability and substitution than any neat refrigerant narrative.
The full analysis on https://househeating-pulse.com/guides/2026-eu-heat-pump-price-efficiency-split-r290-r32 shows why a simple “R290 is better” or “R32 is cheaper” claim is not reproducible from the supplied registry extract. The EPREL Public API material here includes market-wide counts, type-level efficiency baselines, and some top-model slices, but it does not expose the refrigerant-by-SCOP or refrigerant-by-price tables needed to compute a valid premium. So the article is explicit: no average purchase-price gap can be measured, and no average SCOP delta can be stated for R290 vs R32 overall or by product type.
What can be verified from the dataset is the surrounding structure. Across all refrigerants, average SCOP sits at 4.77 for ground-water units, 4.54 for air-water, and 6.15 for water-water, while the market-wide catalog includes 23,466 A+++ listings. Manufacturer concentration is also visible: Daikin Europe N.V. leads the full registry with 14,668 listings, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. at 5,575 and Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH at 3,602.
The smaller-capacity slices add one practical clue: the lowest R290 example in the sampled power_asc list is 0.7 kW, compared with 1.0 kW for the lowest R32 entry, and both refrigerants cluster in air-air products there. That points to product-mix differences, not a universal performance verdict.
Read the full analysis with live data at https://househeating-pulse.com/guides/2026-eu-heat-pump-price-efficiency-split-r290-r32 for the EPREL-slice methodology and reproducible catalog view.
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/guides/2026-eu-heat-pump-price-efficiency-split-r290-r32.
