How to select the correct safety standards?

As a manufacturer, you are responsible for checking that your products meet all relevant safety, health, and environmental requirements before placing them on the EU market. To do so, you have to follow the CE marking process and identify the applicable safety standards. Here are a few tips on how to select your standards.

First, answering the following questions can be of help in identifying relevant product safety standards:

What type of product do you plan to sell in the EU?
Who is the target audience? E.g. consumers, installers and economic operators.
In which country are you going to sell the product?
Which are the latest references of EN standards?
Is there national or local legislation that applies to your product?

Second, when selecting standards, you should do the following:

Use European harmonised standards (EN) whenever possible.
If no EN standards exist for your products, you can try to identify relevant IEC standards.
In case that you cannot use EN and IEC standards, you can focus on identifying EU national standards.
As a last option, you can use codes of practice recognised within the European zone to ensure product compliance.

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