Does the EUP directive concern us?

EUP (Energy Using Products) or the Eco design directive is a frame directive that sets demand on ECO design. According to the directive a manufacturer is not affected until an Implementing measure is published affecting his product group. Then those ECO design criterias are base for the CE-mark. Product analyses are runned within EU to judge which products need ECO design criterias. At the moment energy efficiency is the focus. Big savings in energy can be done using state of the art technology in many sectors of the industry. Please read more about EUP and power supplies. The Implementing Measure; Standby and off-mode (lot 6) is a horizontal directive. In its Annex I there are a number of defined product groups that shortly have to meet those criterias. The actual status of product groups can be found at this eceee site. For Swedish customers Energimyndigheten has a very good EUP web site. The EU commission site is slightly confusing, but have some patience and you will make it. On Power Supplies the ECO design criterias was decided the 17 October 2008 (lot 7) on no load power consumtion and efficiency levels. This only valid for the products listed in above mentioned Annex I, which is based on electronics for private consumers and some office appliances. At the moment there are no requirement on industry applications yet. Therefore the answer of the above head line is no. However it will inderectly affect the industrial PSUs as there will be focus on those parameters. Efficiency has always been an important design parameter in PSUs and the suggested levels are only problematic in certain applications and on low output voltages. The main purpose with the efficiency requirement was to remove low power 50/60Hz transformer products. No load power is there because care less consumers leave there mobile or laptop charger on, without switching off the input. In Industrial applications the power supply is used for continuos operation and therefore this requirement is not of highest importance. In some DC-DC application it can be of interest. Standby means the equipment is ready to recieve a remote start demand. Principally its remote controlled equipments and printers. If the suggested stand-by levels would be implemented in the industry it could cause many problems. Stand-by demand can only be solved in collaboration with the PSU manufacturer and the application designer. In many consumer products it is impossible to use a hard switch off button. In the ECO design criterias it is demanded. Industry products shall operate continuosly so therefore this can never be a requirement. It is however common in labb power supplies that usually are equipped with hard switch on/off. Another important ECO design criteria is the life expectancy of the products, which for industrial electronics is much longer than consumer products.

Last Updated on Monday, 04 January 2010 08:51