Storage refrigerators and the Energy Label

More than one year after the introduction of the Energy Label for storage refrigerators (EU 2015/1094), Topten performed an evaluation assessing whether product declaration requirements were fulfilled.

The review assessed the product declarations of 1914 models and the results were quite surprising:

• Over a year after the introduction of the Energy Label still 56% of storage refrigeration models did not disclose the energy efficiency class of the product.
• Not much improvement was seen since a 2016 review where 58% of appliances were noncompliant
• During the data gathering, defining whether a refrigerator fell into the category of storage refrigerators was in practice very challenging as the definition in the regulation leaves much room for interpretation.

The review also showed that since the first review in 2016:

• Three models already reached the A+ class
• The market has experienced a shift from the D to the C class where the number of models in the C class has increased from 23% to 35%.
• The shift led to a drop in the average Energy Efficiency Index (EEI) from 63% to 59%.

Figure 1: Result overview of product review

These results show that market surveillance is strongly needed but these results can also be explained by some shortcomings in the Regulation that should be tackled in the next revision.

Adaptation of the Regulation to the B2B market

Requirements prescribing the product declaration on the internet were formulated without truly taking into account the fundamental differences in between the B2C and B2B markets.

Ambiguity of the scope

There still needs to be some clarification in the scope of the regulation. This ambiguity can be exploited and be used as a loophole, but it also can confuse manufacturers since it is not always clear what product should be labelled or not.

More information

• Download the review (also available on Topten.eu)
• Download a PDF of this Focus
• Contact: maike.hepp@topten.ch