To customers who upgraded their Air Conditioners this year, you may have noticed that there is additional wiring on your Air Conditioner and possibly even a separate circuit board. This is for “A2L mitigation” which sounds crazy (and it is), but we will break down why this exists.
As time progresses, we find better refrigerants.
We started with absolutely horrible chemicals as a refrigerant like ammonia, sulfer dioxide, methyl chloride, and propane. In 1928, Freon (R-12) was the first non-toxic, non-flammable refrigeration fluid, which made air conditioning a much safer product for wide use.
As time went on we realized how dangerous for the environment R-12 was, and we moved on.
In 2025, we did another change, in search to find something with a lower “Global Warming Potential” that would still be able to operate and deliver what we needed, but if it did escape into the air, it wouldn’t damage it as much as R-410A, or R-22 would.
The world had an answer, but the USA had to be different.
The world has adopted R-32 as the replacement to R-410A units a while ago. Unfortunately, some American manufacturers fought for doing a blend. We believe this is due to greed, and the fact that blends of refrigerant can be patented and they can make more money on it. R-32 is a pure refrigerant and cannot be patented. Any manufacturer can make it.
This means we are stuck with a fragmented market. Most all of the American brands use R-454B, however, the powerhouse of Daikin (which owns several brands from Amana, Goodman, and their namesake Daikin) are using R-32.
The Good Guys have four refrigerants and four recovery tanks on our trucks. It is a pain in the butt, but we believe in having all refrigerants ready to go. R-22, R-410A, R-32, R-454B.
So what is A2L, and why do I have extra circuits?
An A2L is a classification of refrigerant. The “A” means it is non-toxic, the “2L” is a subclass of class “2” which means it is flammable, however only mildly.
It sounds scary, until you realize that it is not remotely dangerous in any practical application. For either of the new refrigerants to burn, they need a constant source of ignition. You do not have any reason to worry about your home’s safety of your family’s safety.
Because of the classification, and there aren’t updated rules to have things make more sense… we have to treat this like it is fully flammable. That means all Air Conditioner with R-32 or R-454B need a mitigation device and a circuit to “protect” you.
On all indoor coils we have a refrigerant detector that is sniffing the airflow. If it senses refrigerant, even in trace amounts, it will tell either the furnace (if capable) or a mitigation device (external circuit board) to turn off the Air Conditioner and turn the fan on to 100% and let it spread out the gas.
We have concerns down the road of how reliable these sensors are going to be. Are they going to cause false positives and trigger significant number of service calls? Safety is important to us, but we need to find the balance of safety precautions that make sense.