Heat Pump Manufacturing with ABB Robots

Heat pump manufacturing is growing again in Europe. Residential heat pump sales rose 11 percent in the first half of 2026, the Guardian reported on September 28, and new factories are opening to keep up. Inside those plants, much of the work is still done by hand, above all the brazing of copper refrigerant pipes. This post traces how refrigeration circuits were built before robots, what a heat pump line looks like in 2026, where ABB robots such as GoFa, YuMi and the IRB family already help or could help, and which problems with cost, safety and skills remain.

An Ecodan air source heat pump running in the snow, with frost on its coil. Photo: PeterEastern / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How refrigeration circuits were brazed by hand

The heat pump is an old idea. The Austrian engineer Peter von Rittinger built one at a salt works in the 1850s to recover heat for evaporating brine, and in 1938 Zurich's city hall was heated by a heat pump drawing warmth from the river Limmat. For most of the twentieth century, though, the same refrigeration cycle went into fridges, freezers and air conditioners, and the factories that made them set the methods heat pump makers still use.

Workers welding parts at an Electrolux factory in 1947. Photo: Tekniska museet / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Every refrigeration circuit is a sealed loop of copper tube joining a compressor, two heat exchangers and an expansion valve. The joints were brazed by hand: a worker heated each one with a gas torch and fed in filler metal until it flowed into the gap. A good joint looks clean and stays leak tight for decades. A bad one leaks refrigerant slowly and may only be found after the unit is installed. In factories the tube is usually purged with nitrogen while it is heated, so no oxide scale forms inside. Brazers learned the skill on the job, and it is still taught that way to installers today.

A technician brazing copper pipe by hand with a torch. Photo: Capt. John Callahan, 176th Wing Alaska Air National Guard / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Postwar appliance plants scaled this up mostly with more workers. Photos from the 1950s show long rows of fridges in factory halls, with people working on each one by hand. At VEB DKK Scharfenstein in East Germany, planners in 1959 aimed to raise fridge output sixfold by 1965. Machines took over the parts around the circuit first: presses for cabinets, foaming machines for insulation and, later, furnaces that braze whole heat exchangers in one pass.

Rows of fridges in production at VEB DKK Scharfenstein, East Germany, June 1959. Photo: Schlegel / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-64846-0002 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Inside today's heat pump boom, and where ABB robots fit

The demand now comes from heating. Clivet, the Italian company majority owned by Midea, opened a €24 million heat pump factory in Feltre in September 2026. The 14,000 square metre plant can build 8,800 units a year, focuses on commercial units and natural refrigerants, and employs 80 people, 50 of them in production. Clivet says 1,008 solar panels on the site cover about two thirds of its energy use. Daikin began making heat pumps at a new factory in Poland in July 2024. Natural refrigerants such as propane (R290) are flammable, which makes every brazed joint and every leak test matter more.

A Carrier split system heat pump outdoor unit installed beside a house. Photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Brazing itself is starting to move to robots. Induction brazing, where a coil heats the joint electrically instead of an open flame, suits automation because the heat is repeatable. One induction equipment maker describes a refrigerator manufacturer replacing oxy-acetylene torches with a robot-held induction coil on a new heat pump assembly line. The robot moves the coil to a joint, holds it there until the braze is done and moves on, and the supplier reports a heat cycle of about 20 seconds. An ABB IRB 1300 or IRB 1600 could carry a torch or an induction head the same way, guided by a program built in RobotStudio. ABB has not announced a heat pump brazing project, so that is a possibility.

Inside an Ecodan outdoor unit: the compressor and its brazed copper pipework. Photo: PeterEastern / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots already test sealed refrigeration circuits. At Electrolux's refrigerator plant in Curitiba, Brazil, YuMi and GoFa cobots carry out gas leak detection and electrical tests on the production line, and ABB says the change raised the productivity of those tests by more than 68 percent. Electrolux first asked ABB to automate leak detection in 2018. The same task sits at the end of every heat pump line, where each unit is checked for leaks before it is charged and shipped. More examples of this kind are collected in our ABB robot use cases.

An ABB GoFa cobot at a gas leak and electrical test station on Electrolux's refrigerator line in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

What a more automated heat pump line needs

The likely next step is a line where robots take the repetitive, hot or heavy jobs. Robots can braze the standard joints, cobots can run leak and electrical tests next to people, and palletizers such as the IRB 460 or IRB 660 can stack finished outdoor units for shipping. Flexley Mover AMRs can bring compressors and coils to each station. People would keep the tasks that change often, such as routing pipes in new models and fixing joints that fail a test.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Cost and volume are the hard part. A plant that builds 8,800 units a year, like Clivet's, makes many variants in small batches, and a robot cell has to pay for itself across all of them. Flexible tools help: GoFa can be taught by moving it by hand, and ABB's Wizard easy programming, the approach described in no-code robot control, lets technicians change a sequence without writing code. Large makers with high volumes will automate first.

Close view of a GoFa CRB 15000 and its test tooling at Electrolux in Curitiba. Photo: ABB

Safety and skills set the pace too. Brazing near flammable refrigerant needs strict controls on what is in the circuit when heat is applied, and robots must be fenced or limited in speed where people work beside them, which SafeMove handles on ABB controllers. Skilled brazers are hard to find, both in factories and among installers, so robots that handle the routine joints may free those people for the work only they can do. For homes, the result should be heat pumps that are cheaper to build and less likely to leak.

An Electrolux technician working with the FlexPendant beside the cobot test cell. Photo: ABB

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