The road to wider use of HC refrigerants remains a rocky one — although it is still being navigated. The latest developments involve more revisions to the regulatory landscape, the tweaking of a refrigerant mix to make it more energy efficient in certain applications, and, as always, warnings about flammability.
Environment Canada, a government agency set up for coordinating environmental policies and programs, accepted comments through the first quarter of 2013 regarding proposals to revise federal halocarbon regulations first established in 2003. The focus is on recovery; requirements regarding the keeping of service logs; issues related to the release of HCs; and the installation, servicing, leak-testing, and charging of systems using the refrigerant.