Frequently Asked Question

Natural refrigerants sounds environmentally friendly. Can't you use one of these in your air conditioners?

A variety of challenging problems make it difficult to use such refrigerants in residential air-conditioners applications. In terms of their direct effect on global warming alone, natural refrigerants such as carbon dioxide, propane, and ammonia are superior to HFCs. However, they require improvements to their stability, efficiency, and safety in order to render them suitable for use as a refrigerant. Ammonia, for example, is toxic, while propane is ombustible and carbon dioxide has very low efficiency as refrigerant for air-conditioner. As a result, almost all ammonia applications have been used in large industrial refrigeration installations where full safety control can be provided. Carbon dioxide is used as refrigerant for water heaters, where it provides an efficiency equivalent to that of conventional refrigerants. We continue to study ways of overcoming these problems so that these natural refrigerants can be used in general-purpose air conditioners.