An investigation project tendered by the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BauA), with a planned duration of 1½ years, has recently been awarded to Müller-BBM. The concept of the existing quality classification in the area of household appliances, where the energy efficiency categories A, B, C, D... each represent a determined range of power consumption, is to be transferred to a system for the categorization of electronic office equipment such as computers, printers, LCD projectors and copiers with regard to the noise emissions of the equipment.

According to the explanation of project leader Gregor Feneberg of the Test&Telecom team in charge of the project, laypersons are not able to compare these statements in practice even though there are standardized and very detailed specifications as to the measurement and declaration of noise emissions of equipment. An exemplary survey of sales messages of four makers of laser printers showed that the descriptions where not comparable among each other in any way. The messages became even more complex and inaccessible to interpretation for laypersons the more the manufacturer had taken into account the specifications of ISO 7779 and ISO 7296, respectively.

One of the central issues of the project will be the consolidation of existing measurement procedures for noise emission measurements of electronic office equipment in consideration of psychoacoustic measurement methods.

Once the concept is implemented, consumers will be able to compare directly and unambiguously different notebooks, printers or data projectors regarding their operating noise - by means of the univocal category A, B, C, D... - a given device belongs to.

Müller-BBM’s Test&Telecom team has many years of experience in conducting comparative tests on products such as office and telecommunication equipment, consumer electronics and image processing equipment for international consumer associations.