In the 36th issue, we started with an air conditioner TV that Gree showcased at an exhibition in Sao Paulo.
Next—about the shortage of installers:
- a climate engineering college branch opened in Moscow;
- the German project WESPE wants to speed up heat pump installation by 40% through factory pre-assembly and an app that selects equipment from a photo of the boiler room.
Also in the digest:
- 🇺🇸 Texas will spend up to $1.5 billion on air conditioners for all state prisons;
- heat pump sales in Europe grew by 11% over the first half of the year.
Main regulatory news—three new China standards for propane R290, which will affect more than 85% of the world’s residential air conditioners. Starting January 1, 2029, China will ban the production of residential split systems using refrigerants with GWP above 750: R410A is phased out, and R32 will be subject to strict quotas.
Market: wholesale prices are moving in different directions—some suppliers are cutting by 5%, others are raising by the same amount.
In the “Cheapest split system of the week” section, for the first time the same Biryusa model became the cheapest both on Ozon and Wildberries, at around 10,500 rubles. There have been no air conditioners cheaper than 10,000 rubles for the third week in a row.
Guest of the episode—Dmitry Ermakov, head of an HVAC company with neither a website nor advertising: orders come from public procurement.
He explained:
- why technical specifications now list only capacity and compressor type, and therefore Mitsubishi Electric will not win the tender;
- how to close out a loss-making contract without ending up in the register of bad-faith suppliers;
- why the customer cannot screen out participants who dump prices.
In his estimate, a competent installer in Moscow earns 200,000–250,000 rubles, but the peak wage growth occurred in 2024–2025.
The sharpest segment—about general contractors. We told Dmitry about our aggregator that finds won tenders involving ventilation and air conditioning and automatically sends our quotation to the winners.
The main pitfall, in the guest’s view, is the greed of the general contractor: more and more often, only labor is subcontracted out, without the equipment, and an HVAC company cannot earn much on labor alone.
To wrap up, we discussed:
- “Chestny ZNAK” for air conditioners;
- the forecast for next year: the market is “thawing,” but people do not have more money.