Standards
What the markings actually record
Almost everything on this shelf carries a figure, and almost every figure gets read as a promise. None of them is. A nominal output records the point an appliance was tested at, not a range it will roam across; an efficiency percentage records a bench result on normalised fuel; an emission class records what left the flue under that same test; a required draught belongs to the chimney and is printed as though the stove supplied it. Each is exact, each is real, and not one of them says what will happen in your own house. Some are published documents; several of the things this trade calls standards are conventions with no publisher at all, and the difference shows up the day something will not fit. Each page says which it is, in four parts — what the document or the convention fixes, what it does not promise, what it works alongside, and which families on this site depend on it.
Appliance test standards
The European standards that roomheaters, inserts and pellet appliances are tested to, what each one measures, and what none of them promises.
- EN 13240 — Roomheaters fired by solid fuel Appliance test
- EN 13229 — Inset appliances including open fires fired by solid fuels Appliance test
- EN 12815 — Residential cookers fired by solid fuel Appliance test
- EN 14785 — Residential space heating appliances fired by wood pellets Appliance test
- EN 15250 — Slow heat release appliances fired by solid fuel Appliance test
- EN 50291 — Electrical apparatus for the detection of carbon monoxide in domestic premises Detection
Emission and efficiency figures
Dust, carbon monoxide and efficiency: the figures an approval carries, the conditions they are measured under, and the stages that use them.
Fuel standards
What a pellet certificate fixes, how firewood quality classes are written, and which of the figures on a bag are bounded rather than claimed.
Flue and pipe dimensions
The nominal diameters, the wall gauges in tenths of a millimetre, the temperature and pressure classes, and what each designation actually fixes.
Market conventions
Heatable volume derived from an assumed building standard, firewood sold by three different cubic metres: widely used, universally quoted, standardised by nobody.