#refrigerant

"Governor Janet Mills announced that Maine has, two years ahead of time, surpassed its goal of installing 100,000 new heat pumps by 2025, a milestone that represents significant progress in reducing Maine’s reliance on heating oil, lowering heating costs, and curbing harmful carbon emissions.

To continue Maine’s momentum, Governor Mills also unveiled a new target: installing another 175,000 additional heat pumps in Maine by 2027, thereby bringing the number of heat pumps installed in Maine homes, businesses, and public buildings during her time in office to 275,000.

If this target is achieved, Maine would have more than 320,000 heat pumps in total installed across the state.

Heat pumps can be thought of as temperature recycling machines. They are filled with refrigerant fluid and contain a compressor, and they work by extracting excess heat and moving it around, either in or out of a house depending on whether it’s hot or cold.

It’s believed they work best in hot weather, but in February, Maine’s temperatures in some places plummeted during a cold snap to -60°F. Efficiency Maine, which aided in the state’s adoption of heat pumps by organizing rebates for customers under the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, did a survey of owners they had helped the previous year.

Many of [the heat pump owners] reported they were comfortable and warm, and offered to bring up the fact that by February they had already saved hundreds of dollars on home heating systems, over boilers, gas furnaces, and heating oil.

“We are setting an example for the nation,” said Mills at the announcement event. ​“Our transition to heat pumps is… curbing our reliance on fossil fuels, and cutting costs for Maine families, all while making them more comfortable in their homes—a hat trick for our state.”

The transition began in 2019 with bipartisan support of the Legislature, when Governor Mills enacted laws setting ambitious targets for transitioning to renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

Twenty years of peer-reviewed heat pump LCAs, meta-analyzed in 2025. Finding: use phase dominates. Electricity to run the unit over 15-20 years beats manufacturing impact by a wide margin.

Use phase: 60-85% of total impact across most studies. Manufacturing: ~1,500-2,500 kg CO2e for a residential unit, small next to 15 years of operation. Wildcard: refrigerant leakage.

Air-source on R-410A leaking at 2-5% per year can pick up 10-20% of total LCA impact. Ground-source with sealed loops stays under 5%. California's 2026 low-GWP rules push new installs to R-454B and R-32, cutting refrigerant impact ~3x.

Takeaways for contractors: commissioning matters. Manual J calcs matter. Line-set charging matters. Undersized units burn use-phase hours at a premium. Every ton of load miscalculated is another chunk of lifetime impact.

On the refrigerant side: clean recovery, tight joints, minimum open-to-atmosphere time. The tech is the emission lever, not the equipment sticker.

Daikin brought serious firepower to AHR 2026.

On January 28, Daikin Comfort Technologies unveiled NEXIO MAX, a three-tier inverter light-commercial rooftop line running on R-32 refrigerant. The HERO cloud-connected VRV platform debuted alongside it, plus a refreshed residential lineup.

The bigger news came from Daikin Applied, the chiller side of the business. Two launches: the Magnitude WME-C Quad Chiller (2,000-3,000 tons, water-cooled centrifugal) and the Pathfinder AWV-C air-cooled chiller. Both run R-515B, a low-GWP refrigerant that's becoming standard in large commercial and industrial cooling.

These chillers are aimed directly at California's data-center buildout. Hyperscale AI compute needs massive cooling, and every major OEM is fighting for those specs right now.

For commercial mechanical contractors in CA: get service teams trained on R-515B before the first units hit a site. Service documentation and recovery procedures need to be in place, and training lead time is the constraint most shops underestimate.

California is about to start paying contractors for recovered refrigerant.

CARB selected Hudson Technologies on December 9, 2025 as one of two approved reclaimers for REFRESH, a new refrigerant-recovery incentive program. Funding draws from the state's F-gas Reduction Incentive Program, up to $5 million. Program administration goes through NASRC.

Two refrigerants qualify: R-410A (the one in most residential systems from 2006 onward) and R-22 (the older one still in service on systems 15+ years old). Contractors get a bonus on top of the standard reclaim payment when they recover these gases instead of letting them escape.

The timing is tied to California's 2030 ban on new R-410A sales. The state wants the installed base to get recovered cleanly, not vented. REFRESH is the carrot.

If your recovery documentation is sloppy, tighten it up. Enrollment is expected to open in Q2.

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