Eurovent ECP-05-2026 and ErP for AHUs — the Compliance Guide Sales Engineers Actually Need

If you quote air handling units in Europe, two frameworks decide whether your unit is sellable: the ErP regulation (the legal floor) and the Eurovent certification programme (the market's quality label). This guide explains both in the language of a sales engineer, not a lawyer.

ErP: the legal minimum

The Ecodesign regulation for ventilation units classifies most AHUs as NRVU — non-residential ventilation units. For bidirectional units the headline requirements are:

• Heat recovery is mandatory, with a minimum thermal efficiency (73 % for run-around coils' plate/rotary equivalents under the current tier).
• Internal specific fan power (SFP_int) must stay below a threshold that depends on filtration and heat-recovery configuration.
• The unit must ship with a declaration listing airflow, pressure, efficiency and SFP figures.

Fail any of these and the unit cannot legally be placed on the EU market. This is why your selection software must show the ErP verdict while you design — a compliance check that runs only at printout time will happily let you configure an illegal unit and discover it after the customer meeting.

Eurovent ECP-05-2026: the market label

Eurovent's certification programme for AHUs goes further than ErP. The 2026 revision (ECP-05-2026) grades units into energy classes using fs-Pref ratios — the unit's fan power consumption relative to a reference configuration — computed separately for winter and summer conditions:

Class	Meaning
A+	Best in class — both seasonal ratios well under reference
A / B	Competitive mid-range
C – E	Legal but increasingly hard to sell

Two details trip teams up:

1. Both seasons count. A unit can be A+ in winter and only class B or E in summer — the label your customer sees reflects the combined verdict, so a summer-blind selection process produces surprises.
2. Traceability is part of the audit. When Eurovent audits a certified range, they replay selections. Your dossier needs to record which engine version and which catalog version produced every number. A PDF assembled by hand in Word cannot prove that.

What an auditable dossier contains

A submission-ready technical data sheet in 2026 includes, at minimum:

• General specifications: airflows, velocities, design conditions, casing construction
• Per-component duty: filter dP clean/fouled, coil capacities winter/summer, HRS efficiency both seasons, fan operating points on the curve
• Sound power per octave band, energetically summed per connection
• SFP_int derivation and the ErP threshold comparison
• The Eurovent class computation: winter fs-Pref, summer fs-Pref, resulting class
• An audit block: engine versions, catalog versions, selection IDs, calculation timestamps

How AirSelect3D handles this

AirSelect3D computes the full ECP-05-2026 verdict live — both fs-Pref ratios update on every component change, and the compliance readout sits next to the 3D model, not on page 12. Every calculation response is stamped with engine_version, catalog_version and a selection_id, and the 14-page dossier is generated from those stamps. If the winter class is A+ and the summer class is E, you see it before your customer does.

Related reading: How to choose AHU selection software in 2026 · Specific fan power explained