The members of this section are European small- and medium-sized manufacturers of winter maintenance equipment such as snow-clearing machines, e.g. snow ploughs, snow blowers and cutters and spreading machines mainly used on public areas, roads and airports.

The main technical topics of this branch are European standardisation and harmonisation, the interfaces between attached equipment and the carrier vehicles and the standardised test procedure for spreading pattern and performance.

The manufacturers of spreading machines associated in EUnited Municipal Equipment and the Engineering Center Bygholm in Denmark have developed an agreed test method with the main intention: One common test procedure making spreading quality comparable and providing repeatability and reliability, independent from road and weather conditions.

When spreading thawing agents such as salt or brine on traffic roads, the aim is always:

Therefore, it is a common interest of manufacturers and users to operate spreading machines - also referred to as spreaders or gritters - in such way, that a homogeneous distribution of spreading material is achieved within the set spreading dosage, width and spreading pattern track.

Since this distribution performance is the most important quality feature of a spreading machine, manufacturers and users have created their own test procedures separately from each other in order to obtain nformation about the distribution quality. This has resulted in a high variety of different test methods all over Europe. Later on European experts - manufacturers and users - started at CEN to work out a common test procedure for verifying the distribution quality of spreaders in a European Standard.

As a first result, EN 15597-1 has been published defining a static test method to verify the accuracy of set spreading dosages of thawing material brought out with a spreader in a defined time period.

Subsequently this CEN expert group tried to develop a common dynamic test for verifying the distribution quality during driving and as close as possible to real operating conditions. But these experts could not agree on standardised test conditions. Due to the different kinds of thawing materials used throughout Europe and the lack of experience in determining the exact quantity of thawing material spread on the road, this group decided to publish a Technical Specification instead of a European Standard. This has led to the situation that all operators choose different methods to determine the precision of the spreading pattern. Until today the test methods have not been specified in detail. The new EUnited spreader performance test is a new approach towards a harmonised European test procedure.