What are the refrigerant cylinder colour codes — and are they still valid?

The old palette — and why everyone remembers it

For decades the paint was the workflow — a technician grabbed "the green one" without reading a word. That muscle memory is exactly what the 2020 change set out to retire.

Why AHRI abolished its own system

Two reasons, both safety. The palette ran out: as blends multiplied, assigned colours converged into near-identical pastels under warehouse lighting — similar shades on chemically incompatible gases invited the misidentification the system existed to prevent. Colour is forgeable and fallible: paint fades, cylinders get repainted, counterfeiters match shades effortlessly. Guideline N's answer was radical simplification: one colour for everything, so nobody can be tempted to identify by paint, plus a red band solely to flag flammability. Identification moved wholly to the printed label, stamped markings and documentation.

What replaces the colours

The modern identification stack: read the label (refrigerant number, name, hazard pictograms), check the shoulder stampings, reconcile with the SDS and batch papers (SDS guide), and where history is uncertain, verify with a refrigerant identifier before charging. India adds its own wrinkle: stock manufactured under older conventions still circulates, so the field is mixed-livery for years — treat any colour, old or new, as decoration until the label agrees.

The buyer's takeaway

A cylinder's colour proves nothing about its contents — in either direction. What proves contents is the label-to-documentation chain from a registered seller of branded product; anything else is trust in paint, which is precisely what counterfeiters sell (see genuine vs counterfeit). Under GCR 2016 practice, altering cylinder colour is also prohibited — report repainted or scraped cylinders rather than accept them (storage rules).

Living through the changeover: a dual-livery decade

Standards change on a date; warehouses change on inventory turnover — so India's field reality is a long dual-livery period in which pre-2020-convention cylinders, RAL 7044 grey-green stock, brand-specific liveries and refilled trade cylinders all circulate together. Managing the ambiguity is mostly procedure: train the label reflex — the printed designation, not the paint, is the identification, full stop; make new hires say the fluid name from the label before connecting anything. Use colour only as a contradiction detector — a shade that disagrees with the label is grounds to stop and verify (identifier, supplier query), while a shade that agrees proves nothing. Preserve the red band's meaning — flammability marking is the one colour signal retained by design, so never store or transport in ways that obscure it, and treat its absence on known-A2L stock as a labelling defect to report. Quarantine the unreadable — a cylinder whose label is gone or defaced is unidentified pressurised chemical; it goes aside for verification or supplier return, never into service on a colour guess, and under GCR practice repainting or defacing is itself prohibited. The transition also has a fraud dimension worth naming: counterfeiters exploit changeover confusion, since 'old stock, old colours' excuses odd liveries — one more reason the authentication chain in genuine vs counterfeit leans on seals, documents and source rather than anything sprayed on steel.

Related: Genuine vs counterfeit · SDS guide · Compliance & quality