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 a clean threshold in the EPREL feed: among heat-pump listings with a declared refrigerant, propane now holds 53.7%, ahead of R32 at 43.5%. That is the signal worth watching in the full analysis on househeating-pulse.com: not that propane has taken over the whole market, but that it has become the dominant refrigerant inside the identifiable declaration set.
The apparent contradiction is important for data users. Across the full EPREL universe, there are 60,989 heat-pump models, and only 537 are explicitly tagged R290, or 0.88% of all listings. So the inflection is real, but it is happening inside a subset of models with declared refrigerant fields, not across every listing in the corpus. That makes source attribution and slice criteria matter: the count is built from the market index snapshot, not from a brand sentiment scrape or a press-release tally.
The strongest structural driver is the product mix. Air-water is the largest EPREL segment at 30,452 models, well ahead of air-air at 21,065 and heat-pump water heaters at 9,228. The dataset does not provide a refrigerant-by-type cross-tab, so no one can claim from this evidence alone that air-water is definitively the largest R290 segment. But it is the most plausible engine of absolute growth, simply because it is where the listings mass sits.
The regulatory context explains the pivot. The refrigerant reference table gives R290 a GWP of 0 and R32 a GWP of 771, while also flagging the tighter future path for higher-impact refrigerants. For buyers and installers, the practical question is no longer whether propane exists in the catalog; it is where it fits, how flammability constraints affect deployment, and which segments can absorb the transition fastest.
If you want the numbers, the definitions, and the reproducible table slices behind this shift, read the full analysis with live data.
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/r290-share-inflection-europe-2026.
