Let me get to the punch line first, and tell the story second.
Yesterday, I found out that:
- I own about $5,000 worth of R-22 refrigerant, a.k.a., Freon. That’s at full retail, the price I’d have to pay currently to replace it.
- That $5K worth of refrigerant is held in place by a less-than-reliable $1 device that was invented in the late 1800s.
As an economist, I goggle at the mismatch.
But there appears to be nothing I can do about it. Except to wait for the inevitable leak.
Now I’ll tell the story. And try go get up to speed on modern refrigerant options. And try to plan ahead.
My world and welcome to it.
My house came with an exceptionally quirky HVAC system.
The key elements are a pair of ground-source heat pumps. That sounds pretty eco-friendly and high-tech, right?
As actually implemented, my home HVAC is a Rube Goldberg machine. There’s a mile of plastic pipe buried in the back yard. Two pumps circulate water through that mile-long loop, terminating at two commercial (not home) AC compressors. These grumble away in the basement, feeding refrigerant lines running to air handlers — the things that actually blow the hot or cold air around the house. Those air handlers were clearly part of an earlier system, and to reach the one in the attic, the installers ran about 100′ of refrigerant lines outside, up the side of the house, and over top of the roof. The whole mess is controlled by a mix of wired and wireless thermostats of dubious reliability. These, in turn, interface with the 65-year-old three-zone baseboard hot water heat via a high-tech high-efficiency gas furnace and electronic interface, that actually turns the hot water baseboards on and off via valves than run on melted wax. (That’s not sarcasm, that’s a Taco (pr. Tay-co) valve.)
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
In any case, we fired up the heat pumps this past weekend, only to find that one of the two heat pumps wasn’t. Pumping heat, that is.
A service call later, and the diagnosis is that the unit is drastically low on refrigerant.
Normally, that’s not much of an issue. Find the leak, fix it, and refill the system.
But in this case, it’s a problem. That’s because the bozos who installed those heat pumps less than 20 years ago cheaped out and installed units that use R-22 refrigerant, also known as Freon. Of ozone destruction fame. That can no longer be made in the U.S. or imported into the U.S.
(At the time they installed these, it was already well known that Freon was on its way out. When I replaced the AC in my prior house, years before, I opted for the newer “Puron” (R410-A) refrigerant. Buying a new R-22 unit at that time would have been foolish. But now I own two of them.)
Normally, that’s not much of an issue either. There are now drop-in replacement refrigerants like R-421A. These don’t destroy the ozone layer, and in most cases you can simply vacuum out the R-22, replace with R-421A (or similar), and get on with your life. (They have a huge global warming potential, though, as discussed below.)
But in this case, it’s a problem. Apparently those replacements won’t work in every system. My HVAC guy assures me that mine is one such. Maybe the 100′ long refrigerant lines have something to do with that. Maybe it’s the fact that these are oddball commercial units, not home units.
So in my case, the options were to fix the leak and top up the leaking unit with R-22, or throw it away and get a new one. Which, owing to the unique setup, is almost certainly going to cost a mint. Assuming my HVAC guy is giving me the straight story.
So I had my HVAC guy repair the leak and top up the system. Which is when I found out that this company now charges more than $300 a pound for R-22. I expected it to be expensive — that’s been in the works since 2010, when the decision was made to phase it out in the U.S. Which means my replacement cost for the 14+ pounds of R-22 in my two units is somewhere around $5000.
(But I didn’t expect it to cost me more than $300 a pound, but it was a decision that I made on the fly. I now see that the wholesale price of R-22 is around $40 a pound. As shown below. So my HVAC guy apparently took a roughly 800 percent markup. Because, hey, my system wasn’t going to run without that additional R-22. So they got me. But this definitely means I’m looking for a new HVAC firm. And I’m also wondering whether I got the straight scoop regarding whether or not drop-in replacement refrigerants will work.)
And what caused the leak, for which I had to purchase about $1500 worth of R-22? That was due to a faulty Schrader valve. Which is a roughly 70 cent part, using a design patented in 1893.
And that’s just the way it is. The valves that made sense when they were holding in the (then) $1 a pound Freon are now are all that stands between the atmosphere and my precious antique R-22.
Looking ahead.
Given the dollars involved, I probably ought to think through what my next steps are. As opposed to panic-purchasing something the next time there’s a problem.
There are a lot of considerations.
Source: US EPA
First, with no new production or import allowed in the U.S., at the current price, it’s a pretty good bet that R-22 is now a zero-sum game. That is, everything currently residing in appliances will get reclaimed and re-used, until it all eventually leaks into the atmosphere.
(In theory, per the EPA, you can ship your R-22 off to have it destroyed at a certified destruction facility. Or you can plan on storing it safely, indefinitely. But I don’t see that happening if you can re-sell it to your customers at $300+ a pound.
This means there is no environmentally benign way to get rid of the R-22 that came with my house. If I opt for new equipment, the HVAC techs will, by law, recover (pump out) all the R-22 in the current system. But surely they’ll sell that to be reclaimed and re-used. Which means that it will be used in somebody else’s leaky system. And one way or the other, it’s going to end up in the atmosphere.
I should mention here that in addition to R-22’s destruction of the ozone layer, all these refrigerants — even the ozone-benign ones — have a horrifically high global warming potential (GWP). R-22 isn’t the worst, but it’s bad enough, with a 100-year GWP of 1850 (reference). Or, in other words, a pound of that stuff has as much impact as 1850 pounds of C02. My little R-22 leak had as much global warming impact as releasing about four tons of C02. That’s about the same global warming impact as an entire year’s worth of electricity use, in my house.
I think that gives me my first and most obvious decision point: As long as my current heat pumps don’t leak, I should make every effort to keep them running. Even though the equipment is old, it’s still a reasonably efficient heating and cooling plant because it’s a ground-source system. I don’t think any marginal efficiency improvements from new equipment could plausibly offset the GWP from the earlier-than-necessary release of my 14 pounds of R-22.
The fact that I own this R-22 is nothing for me to feel guilty about. I’m not the one who installed the R-22 heat pumps. But now, I’m the custodian of it. It’s on me to address any leaks, to try to keep this crap bottled up for as long as possible.
Conversely, as soon as a unit develops an irreparable leak, I should decommission it. With one caveat. My HVAC guy actually gave me the option of just refilling the system, and not bothering to find the leak. With a slow leak, plausibly I could have kept this running for years on maybe a pound of R-22 per year. But if I could not fix the leak, it would be better that the R-22 go into somebody else’s system, with the chance that it doesn’t leak, than to keep it in a known leaky system.
(And so, that’s the first benefit of thinking this through. Because, had this occurred in some sort of emergency situation, such as a deep cold snap, I’d probably have opted to keep the system running at all costs. Now I have my head screwed on straight regarding the environmentally sound(er) thing to do.)
The caveat is that the systems you can get today all use refrigerants with high global warming potential. So much so that refrigerants that were cutting-edge replacements for R-22 twenty years ago are themselves now being phased out. Puron (R410-A), for example, has a GWP of more than 2000. It came on the market in 1996, and it’s slated to be phased out sometime in the 2030s.
So the caveat boils down to this: If we’re only a year or two away from new units that use a truly benign refrigerant (no ozone destruction, minimal GWP), it might make sense to limp along for that year or two, rather than install new equipment with soon-to-be-outdated refrigerant.
Right now, as I read it, the world of low-GWP refrigerants is in flux. For heat pumps, Carrier now makes a large commercial ground-source unit using R-1234ze, with claimed GWP of less than 1 (reference). Looks like some other manufacturers are jumping on that bandwagon. So, plausibly, if that trend continues and they enter the home heating and cooling market, by the time I have to replace these old R-22 ground-source heat pumps, I ought to have a fairly efficient and environmentally benign alternative.
In the meantime.
Meanwhile, I remain appalled that the same century-old tech that keeps my car tires inflated is all that stands between my precious R-22 and the outside world. When my HVAC guy comes back for a routine maintenance visit in the spring, I’ll be grilling him about options for making sure I never get another Schrader valve leak on these systems. Maybe I can have him replace those prophylactically (there are tools for replacing them with out losing the R-22). Maybe it’s a question of putting gas-tight caps over them.
One way or the other, there has to be a more secure way to keep this particular genie in the bottle. The valves that made sense 20 years ago seem ridiculously out of place for a gas that’s going for hundreds of dollars a pound.
