Updated energy standard for residential refrigerator

"Household and similar refrigerating appliances" (GB/T 8059-2016) was officially implemented on July 1st, 2017.  This is the first time to revise the refrigerator’s energy standards in past 22 years.  The new version will benefit to the development of the products, technology and market.

The new version has integrated previous four standards into one and adjusted the related contents, including expanding the products scope, introducing testing program and improving testing methods.

With the popularity of air-cooled and inverter refrigerators in over 20 years, consumers’ demand and spending are increasing, which makes China domestic refrigerator market more complicated.  The Standard modifies many items of scope, cooling capacity, structure, materials performance, noise, testing and preservation, meeting the demand of industry development and future.

Changing on testing methods

The new version changes testing methods for refrigerator, including volumetric testing, refrigerating capacity testing, electricity consumption testing, storage temperature testing, freezing capacity testing, ice making testing, cooling capacity testing, structure and materials testing and noise testing.  The changes for electricity consumption testing are focusing on environment temperature, characteristics temperature, room temperature and steady data selecting, and calculating method, as well as adding the upload electricity consumption testing method.

The changes on testing method for refrigerating performance is the focus, including storage temperature, freezing capacity and ice making capacity, and adds the testing for temperature reduction and cooling capacity.

The new version cancels the limits on over 500 ml refrigerators and adds the definitions of absorption refrigerator, embedded refrigerator and wine showcase.

The changes for noise requirements include the number of test points for different installation methods and height of refrigerators, stipulating the environment temperature, relative humidity and air pressure for testing, detailing the requirements on room temperature and data selection, stipulating the main room temperature when testing noise and that the testing time should be from 1min after start to the shutdown.  Three continually stable testing should be operated and logarithmic mean value should be the final result.

The new version standard brings more convenient for manufacturers but also challenges.  The changes of testing and calculating method for electricity consumption and storage temperature will need high level laboratory and upgraded calculation software.