❄️ Capital Planning for the R-22 Phase-Out: Auditing Your Legacy Equipment Portfolio

R-22 (HCFC-22) was phased out of US production and import on January 1, 2020 under the Clean Air Act. The refrigerant that was once the standard for residential and commercial HVAC is now available only from reclaimed or stockpiled sources — and prices have climbed accordingly.

For property managers and HVAC companies servicing older portfolios, this is a capital planning problem as much as a service one. The question is not just whether a unit needs a recharge — it is whether that recharge still makes financial sense, and whether ownership understands the legacy equipment exposure across the entire portfolio.

Building Your R-22 Equipment List

The first step is knowing what you have. In Equipment Tracker Pro, every equipment record has a Refrigerant field. If you've scanned nameplates with the AI scanner, this field is likely already populated. If not, you can filter your equipment list by refrigerant type to see what's been logged and what still needs to be added.

Any unit manufactured before roughly 2010 is a candidate for R-22. Systems manufactured from 2010 onward were required to be able to use R-410A. If you're unsure, the nameplate refrigerant field will tell you — or a quick model number lookup will confirm.

Building a Replacement Forecast Ownership Will Approve

Equipment Tracker Pro's Pro Reports include a **Refrigerant Inventory Summary** that lists every unit grouped by refrigerant type — exportable as a PDF. Filter the entire building portfolio by gas type and you have an immediate inventory of every R-22 unit with its age, BTU capacity, and service history in one document.

The install date and manufacture date fields give you the age of each unit. Combined with the refrigerant service history — how many recharges, what each one cost, and the leak rate calculated automatically in the service log — you have the data to build a print-ready **Equipment Age & Replacement Forecast** that justifies capital expenditure to ownership in numbers they can follow. When a 19-year-old R-22 RTU has been recharged three times in two seasons at current reclaimed refrigerant prices, the replacement math makes itself.

Jonathan Curtis

HVAC Technician & Founder · Equipment Tracker Pro

Jonathan Curtis is an HVAC technician and the founder of Equipment Tracker Pro. He built the app to solve real problems he encountered in the field — including the daily frustration of unreadable nameplates on aging rooftop equipment.