The European Ozone Depleting Substances Regulation and how it will affect your Air Conditioning and Refrigeration systems.

It is important that you understand the European Ozone Depleting Substances Regulation and how this will affect your equipment before it starts to have a potentially detrimental effect on the operation of your business.

Before we discuss the specifics of the regulation it is useful to take a look at a simplified time line of why this piece of regulation has come about and what is contained within it:-

June 1974 - Scientists discover that chlorinated gases, which includes CFC and HCFC refrigerants, amongst others are having a damaging effect on the Ozone layer.

May 1985 - The British Antarctic survey publish results of a study showing a large hole in the ozone layer.

September 1987 - The Montreal Protocol is signed and is designed to phase out substances which are responsible for ozone depletion.

February 1992 - The US announces that it will stop producing CFCs by the end of 1995, the EU rapidly follows suit.

October 2000 - The European Ozone Depleting Substances Regulation is brought into force.

It has the following important components:-

• A complete ban on the use of HCFCs (R22) in new equipment from January 2001 with two temporary exceptions:-
  • Systems with a cooling capacity of less than 100kW (delayed until the 1 st of July 2002).
  • Reversible air conditioning/heat pump systems (delayed until the 1 st January 2004).
• Complete ban on the supply of HCFC virgin refrigerant from the end of 2009.
• Servicing HCFC systems will be restricted to the use of recovered/reclaimed refrigerant from 1st January 2010 - 31st December 2014.
• A complete ban on replacing HCFCs within a system from the 1st January 2015.

You might be asking yourself why do the events in the timeline affect your air conditioning/refrigeration systems? Well unfortunately both CFCs and HCFCs were virtually the perfect refrigerants. They were non toxic and could operate efficiently at low pressure. As you can see from the time line, CFCs have already been outlawed, but R22 which is a HCFC, continued to be the refrigerant of choice up until around 2004 for the majority of systems.

If you have an R22 system you can continue to use it indefinitely. However, after 2009 it is going to become increasingly more difficult to make repairs and replace refrigerant lost through leaks. This is because virgin refrigerant is no longer going to be available and only recovered/reclaimed gas can be used. From 2015 it will be illegal for a contractor to add any additional refrigerant to an R22 system be it virgin or reclaimed gas.

Now is the time to start assessing which of your systems uses R22 and determining how critical they are to the operation of your business. This will enable you to make any necessary decisions or changes, with the minimum impact to your business, before the 2015 deadline.