Flammable Refrigerant Safety

About this course.

Refrigerant safety matters because the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry is transitioning away from high-global-warming-potential (high-GWP) refrigerants toward alternatives with a much lower environmental impact — and some of those lower-GWP alternatives are flammable, which introduces a fire hazard into equipment and work that, for decades, mostly used non-flammable refrigerants. In other words, the environmental improvement comes with a safety trade-off that must be understood and managed. For anyone who installs, services, designs around or manages this equipment, flammable refrigerants are no longer a niche concern: they are becoming mainstream, and the habits and assumptions built up around older non-flammable refrigerants need to be revisited.

To understand the transition, it helps to recall why refrigerants have an environmental impact at all. Refrigerants are the working fluids that carry heat around a refrigeration or air-conditioning cycle. Historically, some refrigerants damaged the ozone layer, and international and Australian action progressively phased those out. Their common replacements, a family of synthetic gases, do not damage the ozone layer but many of them are potent greenhouse gases: if released to the atmosphere, a relatively small quantity can have a large warming effect, which is what "global warming potential" measures. Because of this, there is now a sustained, internationally coordinated effort — reflected in Australian law and policy — to reduce the use of high-GWP synthetic refrigerants and move toward alternatives with a lower GWP. This course does not state specific GWP figures, phase-down percentages or dates; the general and well-established point is that the direction of travel is firmly toward lower-GWP refrigerants.