Bringing the home in the lab: ECOS publishes an article on consumer-relevant testing for household products
ECOS has long been advocating for test methodologies supporting the Ecodesign framework to better reflect real-life conditions and consumer behaviour and has highlighted shortcomings related to current practices in test standards. Even though repeatability and reproducibility are necessary characteristics of test methodologies, they are not sufficient: considering that the purpose of energy labelling is to influence end user’s choice with the provision of accurate, relevant and comparable information, a lack of reflection of real-life behaviour of products at home can misinform consumers, lead to loss of expected energy savings and compromise fair comparability amongst tested products.
ECOS contributed to the development of a methodology to assess the representativeness of a standard, including its implementation, in the case of three example household electrical appliances: washing machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. The methodology has now been published as an article in the Energy Efficiency journal.
