Home appliances: ten years at IFA

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Energy efficiency and connectivity are the two dominant trends that have developed during the decade of the home appliance sector’s participation at IFA. The event, that has become a very important date for the industry has been developing year after year, obtaining a great success, as shown by the number of exhibitors, increased from 70 in 2008 to 180 last year.
These concepts has been underlined by Reinhard Zinkann (Miele), Ceced President, that also pointedly stressed the need to increase the use of dishwashers by Europeans in order to secure important energy and water savings. «There is a huge potential for savings – he stressed citing the wide variations in dishwasher use across the continent and an overall average of just 45%.
According to Ceced, an increase to 65% would provide an annual saving of 28 terrawatt hours, ten times the saving that the European Commission expects from the next label and eco-design regulation for dishwashers, he continued.
Zinkann also commented the development of connected appliances sector, underlining how great efforts had been made to foster open systems, capable of integrating web-based services and appliances from different brands. Interoperability is key. Appliances from different companies need to be able to communicate with each other. Energy management and optimizing the user of energy would be an obvious consumer benefit with the use of energy tariffs or the tapping into self-generated, renewable energy. Connected major appliances had roughly doubled their market value over the first six months of the year and posted a 5% share of the total market.