What the ordinance fixes
It is Germany’s national instrument for small firing installations — the appliance in a house rather than the plant on an industrial site. It sets emission limits and efficiency requirements, it distinguishes stages that came into force at different times, and it governs the installation and periodic inspection of appliances in Germany, including the role of the chimney sweep.
Its second stage is the one printed in listings, because it is the one current appliances are built to. An appliance meeting it is stating that its measured values clear that stage’s limits.
What it does not promise
It is not a European standard and it does not travel. An appliance carrying the designation has cleared a German threshold; whether it satisfies the requirements where you live is a question for your own authority. A listing in another language that prints the German designation is quoting a German document, usually without saying so.
It does not compare appliances any more than the European regulation does. It is a threshold, and everything currently sold has cleared it.
And it is not a measurement of its own. The values it compares against come from the appliance test standards, exactly as they do for the European regulation.
The documents that sit beside it
It sits beside the European Ecodesign requirements rather than replacing them. An appliance on the German market answers to both, and the two are not identical in scope or in the quantities they name.
It also reaches into the installation, which the European regulation does not: in Germany the periodic inspection of the appliance and the flue is a legal duty with a named professional attached to it. That is why German listings so often mention sweeping, and why the sweeping and brush families of this site are larger on that market than the appliance families would suggest.
Where it appears on this site
It appears wherever a listing prints it, which is on a substantial share of the appliance shelf — the survey behind this site found the designation in the titles of stoves and inserts from several makers. The pages report it as what it is: a German national designation, printed by a German seller, quoted onward by sellers elsewhere.
It is also the clearest example on this site of a figure that means something precise and is read as a general badge of quality. The page says what it is, and does not translate it into a claim it does not make.
Questions that keep arriving by post
I am not in Germany. Does this apply to me?
Not as law. It applies to appliances installed in Germany. What it means for you is that the listing you are reading was written for the German market, which is worth knowing when you read everything else in it as well.
Is an appliance carrying the second stage better than one that does not?
It cleared a threshold. On today’s market almost everything does, so the designation separates current appliances from withdrawn ones rather than good from bad. The figures that do compare two appliances are the efficiency and the emission values themselves.
Why do so many German listings mention the chimney sweep?
Because in Germany the inspection of the appliance and the flue is a legal duty with a named professional attached to it. That is part of why the sweeping and brush shelves on that market are so much deeper than the appliance shelves alone would explain.
Last reviewed 22 September 2026