EPA Statement on Drop In Refrigerants

NOTE: Additional information concerning the Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA) policies on "Drop-in" refrigerants may be found on the Internet at http://www.epa.gov/ozone/ or call the EPA's Stratospheric Ozone Protection Hotline, at 800-296-1996.

DROP-IN REFRIGERANTS
Many companies use the term "drop-in" to mean that a substitute refrigerant will perform identically to R-12, that no modifications need to be made to the system and that the alternative can be used alone or mixed with CFC-12. However, the EPA believes the term confuses and obscures several important regulatory and technical points.

- Charging one refrigerant into a system before extracting the old refrigerant is a violation of the EPA's Significant New Alternatives Policy (SNAP) use conditions and is therefore illegal.

- Several alternatives carry an additional use condition to replace standard hoses with less permeable "barrier" hoses.

- It is impossible to test a refrigerant in the thousands of air conditioning systems in existence to demonstrate identical performance. In addition, system performance is strongly affected by outside temperature, humidly, driving conditions, etc.., and it is impossible to ensure equal performances under all of those conditions.

- It is very difficult to guarantee that system components will last as long as they would if R-12 were used.

For all of these reasons, the EPA does not use the term "drop-in" to describe any alternative refrigerant.