By now, most of us in the HVACR industry are aware of and have been affected by the rising cost of HCFC-22 due to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allocation announcement earlier this year.
For those of us involved with the refrigerant side of the industry, this announcement did not come as a surprise. We were well aware that the R-22 supply was abundant and its phaseout was not meeting EPA expectations. We saw this announcement by the EPA as the inevitable phaseout of HCFCs happening sooner rather than later.