Exactly! There is way too much fearmongering about things like hydrocarbon refrigerants. I find it kind of funny how the EPA says you can’t have more than 1lb of R290 in a hermetically sealed refrigeration system but doesn’t give a shit that a large portion of the population has leaky 30lb tanks of the stuff sitting under their BBQ grills right next to their house.
Plus there’s CO2 although the main obstacle for that is just how heniously expensive those systems are. But a large part of that expense is just making transcritical refrigeration work. If we started building buildings with CO2 refrigeration in mind and started mandating installing geothermal heat exchanger loops for all new construction then you just use that to cool the CO2 and eliminate the whole transcritical issue and a massive chunk of the cost for those systems.
Exactly! There is way too much fearmongering about things like hydrocarbon refrigerants. I find it kind of funny how the EPA says you can’t have more than 1lb of R290 in a hermetically sealed refrigeration system but doesn’t give a shit that a large portion of the population has leaky 30lb tanks of the stuff sitting under their BBQ grills right next to their house.
Plus there’s CO2 although the main obstacle for that is just how heniously expensive those systems are. But a large part of that expense is just making transcritical refrigeration work. If we started building buildings with CO2 refrigeration in mind and started mandating installing geothermal heat exchanger loops for all new construction then you just use that to cool the CO2 and eliminate the whole transcritical issue and a massive chunk of the cost for those systems.