MELS explained: what the energy label is required to show

The Mandatory Energy Labelling Scheme puts a duty on whoever supplies the machine. NEA describes MELS as a scheme brought in for regulated goods, so that buyers can compare energy efficiency and make more informed purchasing decisions. Aircon came under it on 1 January 2008, alongside refrigerators. The label is older than almost every unit on sale, and it was never a courtesy.

Two separate registrations sit behind it. Any importer or manufacturer intending to supply a regulated good here must first apply to NEA to become a registered supplier. That supplier must then register the goods before supplying them. One registration covers the company. The other covers the machine.

The label follows from those registrations rather than from a decision to be open. NEA puts it plainly: a registered supplier has to affix the energy label onto every unit it supplies here. Retailers, in turn, may only display models that already carry one. A bare unit on a showroom floor is not one nobody has got round to labelling yet.

Scope is drawn by machine type, not by brand or by price. The regulated list names single-phase non-ducted room air-conditioners and single-phase portable air-conditioners as separate entries, with three-phase VRF equipment separate again. Household split systems sit in the first of those. Knowing which entry a machine falls under matters before treating a missing label as proof of anything.

Every field is prescribed, including the ones that look decorative. NEA specifies the brand, the model number as it appears on the nameplate, the type and the size. It specifies the tick rating, the same rating written out in words, an annual energy cost, an annual energy consumption in kWh, the test standard, a disclaimer, the registration number and the QR code.

Size means something exact on an aircon label. NEA defines it as the full load cooling capacity in kW, rounded to two decimal places. That is a harder figure than the horsepower shorthand a showroom uses, and it traces back to the test report the registration was granted on. Where a quotation and a label disagree about capacity, the label is the one that was tested.

The word beside the ticks is fixed vocabulary rather than the seller's adjective. One tick reads Low, two Fair, three Good, four Very Good, five Excellent. A brochure calling a model highly efficient is making a claim of its own. The label calls it exactly one of five things, and which one is not the supplier's to choose.

The annual cost field gets misread more often than any other, and it rewards slowing down. NEA computes it on fixed assumptions: eight hours of daily use, sixteen hours of standby, and electricity at 27 cents per kWh. None of that describes a particular household. The figure exists so two labels can be set against each other on identical terms, which is a different job from predicting a bill.

The two schemes sit in the same Act and pull in different directions by design. MELS compels disclosure. Minimum energy performance standards do the opposite job: NEA describes the aim as raising the average energy efficiency of regulated goods in the market, and the mechanism is a bar on supplying anything below a set level. One makes a model declare where it stands. The other decides whether it may stand there at all.

Order matters between them, and it runs floor first. A model has to clear the standard before it can be registered, and it has to be registered before a label can be printed for it. The label is downstream of both. Reading it tells you what a model declared. What that model had to clear before anyone would register it is a separate question.

Mixing the two up creates one recognisable mistake on a shop floor. A seller who says a model meets the national standard is naming an entry condition, because a model that failed it could not lawfully have been put in front of you. That sentence sounds like a distinction and is not one. Pointing at the label is a different act, and a checkable one.

The tick scale itself belongs to neither conversation exactly. The bands describe efficiency, the floor decides which bands still hold products, and the two move together because they share a measure. Which bands survive today is a question for the guide covering the MEPS floor. How to read the tick rating on its own terms has a separate guide.

The label is backed by testing that carries on after registration is granted. NEA says it will from time to time carry out verification testing on registered models. For aircon the conformance limit is written as a ratio: the COP computed from the verification test must be greater than 0.9 times the COP computed from the test report data. A declared figure has to survive a retest within a tenth of itself.

Nothing standing beside the label carries that. The poster, the printed spec sheet, the promotional flyer and the salesperson's summary are all the seller's own composition. They are often accurate. What separates them from the label is that no agency has undertaken to retest them, and no certificate stands behind them.

The duty does follow the label off the unit in one place, and that place is advertising. NEA requires a legible energy label to be displayed next to the image or description of a regulated good. Where there is genuinely no room for it, the tick rating and the registration number from the certificate must be stated prominently instead. A listing showing neither is not just a thin listing. It is short of something the rule asks for.

Push back when the model string on a quotation does not match the model string on the label. Registration runs per model, so a near match is a different registration or none at all. An answer of the same series, or the newer version of that one, is describing a machine whose label you have not seen. Ask for the label belonging to the model actually being supplied, then read the registration number off it.

Treat the label as one column and the rest of the shop as another. The first column is prescribed content, affixed under a duty, and open to retesting. The second is persuasion. Both can be perfectly true. Only one was composed by somebody with no stake in the outcome.

The label answers a narrow set of questions completely and refuses everything else. It settles identity, tested capacity, efficiency band and registration. It says nothing about who installs the unit, who honours the warranty, or whether a control board can be found quickly when one fails. Those belong to the supply channel, and whether a unit came through an authorised distributor decides them.

It is silent on fit as well, which is where most regret actually starts. A correctly labelled machine can still be the wrong capacity for the room, sited where it cannot reject heat, or piped badly enough to lose what was declared for it. The aircon buying checklist is where that ground gets covered. No tick count stands in for it.

• •Photograph the label, not the display board. On a split system the label lives on the outdoor unit, so ask to see the outdoor unit.
• •Read the capacity in kW off the label before accepting a horsepower figure. The label states full load cooling capacity to two decimal places.
• •Check the registration number against the Database of Registered Goods. NEA tells buyers to purchase only registered appliances, and the QR code opens the lookup.
• •Treat the annual cost as a yardstick built on eight hours a day at a fixed tariff. Your hours are not the label's hours.
• •Once two shortlisted models land in the same band, the ticks have stopped separating them. Ask for the efficiency figure underneath, which the guide to CSPF explains.