It looks like the EU are going to ditch the confusing and, in this website’s opinion frankly ridiculous energy label with their A+++ or whatever on them and go back to a good old A to G.
The EU parliament in Strasbourg has voted to flip the table back to the way it was and instead o what we see as a bit of a mockery with all the + nonsense just have the straight A to G but realigned them so that they make sense in a bid to confound buyers less.
If you are a regular reader of this website you will be aware that we are not big fans of the EU label and of that reason we tend to be harsh on. Mainly as it’s misleading and ultimately often pointless.
We will however, for now, resist the temptation to trawl over all the bad things about it. Three are plenty of articles on here explaining why we think it’s so useless.
The “new” scale won’t come into effect though until the EU Council proper votes on it. Whenever that happens or they get round to it meaning that for the time being it’s business as usual with the (flawed?) system we have today.
Then there’s the thorny issue of, how do you alter stock in stores when it is changed or, do you bother?
A bigger issue for the UK is, will we have see the new label? After the Brexit vote nobody yet knows what will happen with the EU energy labels, if they UK will even keep using them or if they will be mandatory. At this stage nobody really knows and we’d guess it won’t be right up there on UK politician’s to-do lists either.
The kicker for us though is that the EU intends to review the label on “an ongoing basis” meaning in short that they’ll shift the goalposts every so often and, we’re back to how do you alter already produced stock in stores?
Thing is, while a lot of appliances will sell through in a relatively short time, normally a few months, which wouldn’t make that a big problem, there are several especially niche products that could hang about for a year or more. So someone could buy an A rated product today that was produced a year or so ago that actually, if the system has changed in that time, isn’t A rated when they buy it.
But it’ll stop confusion. They say.
