Overall, the work of the project working groups has been finalised in accordance with the agreed project plan and timeline. In EEPLIANT2, project partners have delivered market surveillance activities – conducting online inspections, reviewing of the technical documentation and testing of the energy performance. The final results, the lessons learned and the enforcement measures taken by the MSAs involved were presented during the project Final Conference held in Brussels on 4 February 2020, revealing worrying level of non-compliance. A brainstorming workshop co-organised with the European Commission during the final stage of EEPLIANT2 provided a further opportunity for the MSAs to explore the underlying causes of the identified non-compliances and to discuss possible remedies.
Household Refrigerating Appliances:
89 online shops were reviewed for proper label display in 10 EU countries combined. 71 shops were assessed as non-compliant (80%) and 18 shops as compliant (20%). When not compliant, most of the time the e-shop failed to correctly display both the energy label and the product fiche. In 34% of cases the information was not displayed at all.
172 document inspections were finalised in 14 EU countries combined. Through a risk-based approach (with over 50 parameters) 61% of cases presented non-compliance issues in the documentation. However, the overall compliance assessment by the MSAs suggests that evidence of compliance was deemed adequate for nearly three quarters of the appliances, and this rate improved after communications from the MSAs to economic operators (83% compliant cases).
64 units corresponding to 43 home refrigerator models were tested in an independent accredited laboratory. 40% of the targeted models were considered as non-compliant. So far, 79 economic operators have taken/are taking action to correct their product's technical documentation or correct the e-shop information, while 17 models were withdrawn from the market, penalty fines were imposed in 8 cases. No cases of use of circumvention software or test manipulation were detected.
Network Standby:
43 of the 161 products inspected were selected for a test in a laboratory, and 5 of these 43 went through a triple testing process. The high overall detected rate of non-compliance at 74% is largely due to missing data. Nevertheless, non-compliance with the networked standby power demands (31.3%) and power management requirements (31.5%) were high. The breakdown of results indicates that the largest single cause for non-compliance was excess power demand in one of the three power modes tested, i.e. 27 out of 43 non-compliant products (63% of total) exhibited excess power demand(s).
Professional Refrigeration Products:
The technical documentation of 64 cabinets was reviewed, whereby 40% required changes to declared data. Out of 29 model tested, 79% failed in a significant respect.
