New R290 Heat Pump from Pipelife

Pipelife launches indoor R290 heat pump designed for Irish apartments

Pipelife Ireland has launched a new indoor monoblock heat pump designed specifically for the demands of Irish apartment construction. The system has been developed from the ground up and rigorously tested to reflect real-world building conditions, rather than relying solely on idealised laboratory environments.

The Inova indoor heat pump houses the fan, coil, compressor and expansion valve in a single unit installed entirely within the dwelling, drawing and exhausting air via ducts. It runs on R290 (propane), the ultra-low global warming potential refrigerant, with a fully sealed charge of just 450 grams, keeping it within the limits for indoor installation. Safety features include a gas separator to prevent refrigerant entering the water circuit, and an internal gas sensor that ramps the fan to 100 per cent to dissipate any leak to outside.

But the detail likely to catch the eye of building services engineers is how the unit was tested. All of Pipelife’s published performance figures are predicated on the unit sitting 10 metres from an external wall, with three 90-degree bends in the ductwork, a deliberately punishing worst-case scenario. If we could be a little less specific, engineers will design to 10m if they know it can. Good design is to reduce the distance, but if required we can go up to 10m. We can enforce that it has been stress tested to the realities of Irish apt design.

“Nobody’s going to put a heat pump on an external wall — architects have to balance daylight regulations along with everything else, so they won’t have the space to do it,” said [Eoghan Considine, Specification Manager], of Pipelife Ireland. He contrasted this with the industry habit of publishing fan curves measured on a bench: “This is everything at a worst-case scenario, not a best-case scenario. We restricted the unit — we stress-tested it.”

The unit delivers 3.2 KW of heating capacity [3.2KW at 35C, 3.14 at 55C, SCOP of 4.7 at 35C, datasheet attached.], is app-enabled, and is tested to EN 14825, with EN 16147 hot water performance data also available. It pairs with a separate hot water cylinder, pre-plumbed at Pipelife’s Little Island facility in Cork, with an inline version to follow that will visually read as a single column. Keeping the cylinder separate was a conscious whole-life decision, Considine said: cylinders typically outlast heat pumps, so the heat pump — or individual components such as the fan or compressor, all accessible from the front of the unit — can be replaced without disturbing the store. It also makes it far easier to manoeuvre the equipment through a finished apartment block.

Equally deliberate is what the Inova doesn’t do. Unlike exhaust air heat pumps, it makes no attempt to combine heating and ventilation, and its performance is not dependent on warm extract air, or on occupants leaving wall vents open.

“The best heat pumps on the market just function as heat pumps. The best ventilation systems just function as ventilation systems,” said Considine. “Why combine things to make them a little bit worse?” Pipelife instead pairs the unit with its own MEV or MVHR systems, supplied as complete packages including ductwork — an approach it says is cost-competitive with combined exhaust air units, while allowing each system to be specified, commissioned and serviced on its own merits.

For passive house apartment schemes, the company argues the Inova opens up a simpler route: a conventional monoblock heat pump strategy plus MVHR, at a lower cost than compact combined heat pump-ventilation units, and using a heating approach familiar to Irish contractors.
The launch draws on considerable experience. Pipelife has been supplying heat pumps to the Irish market since 2009, with more than 10,000 units sold, alongside a fast-growing mechanical ventilation business. The Inova was developed to Pipelife’s own specification with its manufacturing partner, informed by the company’s combined knowledge of heat pumps and ventilation, Irish apartment design guidelines and F-gas regulations. “Restrictions have driven innovation,” said Considine.

The heat pump also lands amid a wider sustainability push at the group, part of Wienerberger’s Pipelife division, which manufactures in 28 countries. The Cork operation — an amalgamation of indigenous firms Quality Plastics, Cork Plastics and MFP — used 7,000 tonnes of recycled material in 2025, with plans to more than double this to 15,000 tonnes by 2030. The company has published seven environmental product declarations to date, and aims to have EPDs for everything it manufactures by 2028, with a group target that 75 per cent of products manufactured or sold support net zero construction. The company buys 100 per cent renewable electricity, with on-site solar generation planned. Servicing of the Inova is carried out entirely from within the apartment, supported by installer training held fortnightly in Dublin and Cork, and the unit will ship with a dedicated plain-English homeowner manual alongside the engineering documentation.

www.pipelife.ie