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 is still not the market; it is the signal. In the 2026 EPREL snapshot, Europe lists 13,935 R32 models versus only 537 R290 models, which means propane sits at 0.88% of the 60,989-model universe while R32 holds 22.85% (market_index_snapshot). That gap is the real headline: the refrigerant transition is visible, but it is not yet broad enough to reorganize the database.
The more interesting pattern is brand behavior around that split. The corpus does not expose a manufacturer-by-refrigerant join, so you cannot responsibly rank “R290 leaders” or “R32 holdouts” from this snapshot alone. What it does give you is the scale context: Daikin Europe N.V. has 14,668 listed models, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. 5,575, and Johnson Controls Hitachi 5,207. Those three alone make up 41.73% of EPREL listings, so any future swing in their refrigerant mix would reshape the market far more than a niche specialist’s move.
Efficiency adds another layer. The market-wide average SCOP is 4.55, but the big catalogs are not the most efficient on average: Daikin sits at 4.44, Mitsubishi Electric at 4.51, and Johnson Controls Hitachi at 4.18. Meanwhile Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH reaches 4.69 and Ariston 4.66, both above the market average (brand_share; market_index_snapshot). That makes the commercial reading clearer: scale, efficiency, and refrigerant strategy are not moving in lockstep.
For reproducible analysis, the key slices are the EPREL refrigerant counts, the brand-share aggregation, and the top-model query. The market index snapshot also shows 23,466 A+++ models and a 3.27% natural-refrigerant share, but the data does not prove that R290 dominates the efficiency leaderboard — the top-R290-model extract returned no rows.
Read the full analysis with live data on the canonical page: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/r290-vs-r32-europe-brand-signal-2026
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-vs-r32-europe-brand-signal-2026.
