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 has crossed the line from “watchlist” to default. In the 2026 EPREL snapshot, propane-coded listings account for 53.7% of the combined R290/R32 pool: 16,478 R290 entries versus 13,935 for R32. That is a 2,543-listing lead inside a catalog of 60,989 heat-pump models from 777 manufacturers, so this is no longer a niche signal or a single-brand artifact.
The source stack matters here. This reading comes from Househeating Pulse’s market_index_snapshot, built on the EPREL Public API, with refrigerant coding cross-checked against the refrigerant_universe table. One caveat: the exact-string refrigerant table only shows 537 entries labeled precisely “R290,” while the market snapshot combines propane variants such as “R290A” and “R290a” into the majority tally. That makes the majority claim robust at the market-snapshot level, but worth handling carefully if you are reproducing the query.
The strategic implication is bigger than the refrigerant split itself. Europe’s catalog is dominated by a small set of manufacturers — Daikin Europe N.V. alone has 14,668 models, or 24.05% of all listings, while Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. and Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH sit at 5,575 and 3,602 respectively. Once the top vendors tilt their portfolios, the aggregate mix moves fast.
What the dataset does not yet prove is equally important. There is no refrigerant-level price series, no SCOP split for R290 versus R32, and no manufacturer-by-refrigerant breakdown in the supplied tables. So the market can be said to have crossed a composition threshold, but not yet a quantified pricing or efficiency premium.
The type mix suggests where the transition is most consequential: air-water systems dominate with 30,452 listings, far ahead of air-air at 21,065 and water heaters at 9,228. That is the volume center where a refrigerant majority will matter most.
Read the full analysis with live data on the canonical page: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/europe-2026-r290-share-crosses-the-majority-mark. For the reproducible breakdown and current tables, read the full analysis with live data again here: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/europe-2026-r290-share-crosses-the-majority-mark.
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-share-crosses-the-majority-mark.
