Abstract Falling film evaporators offer an attractive alternative to flooded evaporators as the lower fluid charge reduces the impact of leaks to the environment and associated safety concerns. A study was conducted of saturated falling film boiling of two refrigerants on one polished, one roughened and three nanostructured copper tubes in order to evaluate the potential of nanostructures in falling film refrigerant evaporators. Tubes were individually tested, placed horizontally within a test chamber and heated by an internal water flow with refrigerant distributed over the outside of the tubes. Wilson plots were used to characterise the internal water heat transfer coefficients (HTCs). A layer-by-layer (LbL) process was used to create the first nanostructured tube by coating the outside of a tube with silica nanoparticles. A chemical bath was used to create copper oxide (CuO) protrusions on the second nanostructured tube. The third tube was coated by following a commercial process referred to as nanoFLUX. R-245fa at a saturation temperature of 20 °C and R-134a at saturation temperatures of 5 °C and 25 °C were used as refrigerants. Tests were conducted over a range of heat fluxes from 20 to 100 kW/m and refrigerant mass film flow rates per unit length from 0 to 0.13 kg/m/s, which corresponds to a film Reynolds number range of 0 to approximately 1500 to 2500, depending on the refrigerant. Heat fluxes were increased further to test whether the critical heat flux (CHF) point due to a departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) could be reached. The CuO and nanoFLUX tubes had the lowest film Reynolds numbers at which critical dryout occurred at heat fluxes near 20 kW/m2, but as the heat fluxes were increased towards 100 kW/m2, critical dryout occurred at the highest film Reynolds numbers of the tubes tested. Furthermore, in some higher heat flux cases, CHF as a result of DNB for the CuO and nanoFLUX tubes was reached before critical dryout occurred, and DNB became the limiting operational factor. The refrigerant condition that had the worst dryout performance in terms of film Reynolds number was R-134a at 25 °C, followed by R-134a at 5 °C and R245fa at 20 °C. Tests across the heat flux range and refrigerant conditions revealed that compared to the polished tube, the roughened tube had HTCs between 60 and 100% higher, the LbL tube had HTCs between 20% lower and 20% higher, the CuO tube had HTCs between 20% lower and 80% higher and the nanoFLUX tube had HTCs between 40 and 200% higher than the polished tube. The falling film enhancement ratios for the plain and nanostructured tubes were found to be of a similar order of magnitude, typically between 1.3 and 0.8.