Within the European Union, the actual enforcement of policies for energy efficiency, energy labelling and EcoDesign is realised on three closely interdependent levels (nationals, European and international). A further action plan is focused on the development of technical standards, strongly related to measurement methods, which constitute the basis for any policy measure. In the last two decades, there has been a lively evolution of legislation for the domestic refrigerating appliances, which resulted in the attempt of the IEC International Technical Committee 59 to develop a unique and shared measurement method for the evaluation of domestic refrigerating appliances performance. This effort takes the name of the standard IEC 62552:2015, released for the process of consultation in March 2013 [1] and published in February 2015 [2]. The work here presented is related to the released March 2013 version of the IEC standard, preceding the IEC 62552:2015 publication, and will be referred hereafter as the “released IEC standard”. The aim of this paper is: i) to contextualise, analyse and discuss the method proposed by the released IEC standard, particularly focusing on the energy consumption aspects; ii) to describe and discuss the results of a series of tests on a domestic refrigerating appliance, performed on the basis of the new proposed method in ENEA, UTTEI-SISP research laboratories, located in Ispra (VA) Italy. The tests conducted on a refrigerator/freezer combination sample represent one application of the released IEC procedure, outside the TC59 of IEC, and the obtained results can be used for a further evaluation of the procedure, also in comparison with the one currently into force. Moreover, the analysis provides first insights about the main critical aspects of application, and suggestions for possible refinements of the new IEC method. © 2015 EEDAL.