As temperatures rise, so will the cost of an AC unit
Cost of Living5:07The hot, sweaty irony of it all
Star Vickery never used to need an air conditioning unit to stay cool in her home in Halifax. But summers are getting warmer, she says, and since she now works from home, it’s become a must.
But cooling your home can be costly. The unit cost Vickery and her husband over $800, plus ongoing electricity costs.
“We can’t live like this anymore. We need to have some comfort,” Vickery told the Cost of Living.
“It’s not an inconsequential expenditure. I mean, that’s a lot of money.”
And that price is going up. The cost of air conditioning units is expected to rise because of regulatory changes, in keeping with the Montreal Protocol of 1987, an international treaty designed to limit the amount of harmful chemicals going into the atmosphere. Signatories include Canada, the U.S. and the EU.
In 2025, units will use a different kind of refrigerant, R-454B, which releases fewer greenhouse gases than R-410A. But it comes at a cost as manufacturers respond to the shift, according to Jeff Johnson.
“Every manufacturer has to redevelop their whole product model and design all new products with all new refrigerant,” said Johnson, who works at the HVAC company Arpi’s Industries in Calgary.
The need for AC
Johnson is fairly busy in the summer: According to the most recent Statistics Canada data released in 2023, about 64 per cent of Canadians have air conditioning.
And the way we’ve built our houses may factor into why there’s such a need for air conditioning units, he says.
Homes have been designed to be energy efficient, and to keep the heat in during those cold winter months. But that also makes for a hot house in the summer.
Johnson says new units will cost 10 to 20 per cent more than their current counterparts, though there is no hard number on what the actual cost increase will be.
If you’ve been putting off getting an air conditioner, you might not want to wait until next year. The cost of AC is expected to rise when new federal regulations go into effect in 2025. Jeff Johnson, residential retrofit manager at Arpi’s Industries Ltd., spoke to the Calgary Eyeopener about what the regulations could mean.
But what’s so harmful about current AC units? The refrigerant is harmful for the environment, and it’s impossible to completely prevent R-410A from getting into the atmosphere during installation, maintenance or malfunction.
The International Energy Agency states that there are about two billion AC units globally, and estimates this could nearly triple to over 5.5 billion by 2050.
According to a report from the website Our World in Data, air conditioning used around seven per cent of the world’s electricity in 2022, and accounted for three pre cent of its carbon emissions.
“As you take off your gauges on the air conditioner, a little bit of refrigerant is always released. Kind of like…
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