Summary of how to register products to EPREL
25 March 2019
The registration of products covered by the Energy Labelling Regulation to the European Product Registration Database (EPREL) is due by April 1. Data from new products (from January 2019) that manufacturers have uploaded in the Production Environment of the EPREL will be accessible by market surveillance authorities from May 3 and by the public by May 29. In addition, all products placed on the market between August 1, 2017 and January 1, 2019 should be registered by June 30, 2019. The European Commission have stated that market surveillance authorities will work ‘collaboratively’ with manufacturers at the beginning and will not focus on penalising non-compliance but rather on supporting economic operators by answering questions and helping them to find solutions (full text here).
The database has three environments: pilot (now discontinued), acceptance and production. For testing how to upload your products to the database, you should use the ‘Acceptance’ environment. Once you want your products and their data to be published, you should use the ‘Production’ environment. The database can be accessed here, and further information on the three environments can be found on previous updates on this page.
There are three ways to register your products to the database, and step-by-step guidance on each method is attached below:
- Manual upload. You can simply enter data manually for each product you need to register using the database’s user interface. This should be straightforward and could be used in cases where the number of products to register is low.
- File upload. This is done by uploading a ZIP file containing an XML with all the models to be created in the database and all the attachments (labels, technical documentation) to be uploaded to the file storage of EPREL.
- System to System. This method uses the same file as ‘File Upload’ but a different delivery method (e-Delivery).
In addition, the Commission has released ‘mock-ups’ specific to space heaters and water heaters and their possible combinations with temperature controls, solar devices and packages (attached below). For each of these, the ‘mock-ups’ show the list of parameters that need to be completed for a space heater and how they correspond with the fields in the database, and the type of entry which should be used.
General guidance from the Commission is available here, including XML Templates for each type of product, and on previous updates on this page. In addition, if you have any specific questions please let [email protected] know and I will escalate this through our European associations. I would also recommend to contact [email protected] or [email protected] directly and ask them about any particular issues – they’re very responsive and will get back to you within a day (approximately).
