If you want to understand the impact this kind of energy rule had while in effect, read up on the Rosenfeld Effect[0].
Arthur Rosenfeld was the driving force behind California and US energy conservation regulations in the 1970's and early 1980's. His direct personal impact on energy cost savings in the US is unbelievable, even before you inflation convert it to modern dollars.
Disassembling an old refrigerator from before the days of those yellow stickers is a mind blowing experience. Refrigerators commonly had heater wires attached to their outer panels. Why? It was cheaper to manufacture refrigerators that had heaters on their outer panels than refrigerators that had adequate insulation (the heaters prevented the outside of the refrigerator from getting cold enough to cause water to condense on the outside of the refrigerator). It was cheaper to make them with heater wires, but unbelievably more expensive to run them that way. Consumers paid a huge price for that tiny reduction in manufacturing cost, and had no way of knowing that was happening. Those yellow stickers changed that.
Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse? Show me another individual who has come anywhere close to the direct financial savings that Rosenfeld, a PhD Physicist, delivered.
The article below primarily talks about his impact on reducing California's spending on energy, in large part because it's easier to quantify, but his impact nationally is undoubtedly much higher.
I’ve never read a press release by a US government agency before, so it may be the standard, but the language in it strikes me as petty and childish, especially the last piece; “sprinkler nozzles that just don’t work well”.
“The people, not the government, should be choosing the home appliances and products they want at prices they can afford.” - you still get to choose which appliance you have in your home, but the government is there to help ensure that appliance is reliable and efficient.
>you still get to choose which appliance you have in your home, but the government is there to help ensure that appliance is reliable and efficient.
I suspect that many people have the opposite experience and blame the government for inefficient and unreliable products. I most often experience and hear others complain about water efficient washing machines.
I hope this means a move away from standards that result in serious usability impacts for moderate improvements.
Examples I've personally experienced is that many/most driers now available require multiple attempts to get clothes actually try. Then there was the debacle of fedora enabling aggressive power saving in a difficult to disable way in updates, claiming it was mandated-- resulting in nonsense like remote hands incidents to unsuspend servers and users using TV as monitors perpetually needing to turn the TV on and off every use because TV's won't wake and the power saving functionality wasn't disclosed (if you could even figure out that this was WHY the screen kept failing-- and did so without sending a display to the landfill first).
Energy efficiency when it comes at no impact to functionality is good (at least if it pays for its own landfill burden-- many home devices have more embodied energy in their manufacture than they'll ever use) but when it has a usability impact it really ought to have a good justification or even just not happen at all because people are capable of choosing more efficient devices when it actually makes sense to do so.
(like the efficiency impact of a device run for 10 minutes a month is very very different from something that runs 24/7 and usually only the owner of the device knows the usage).
Intrusive requirements also set back environmental causes by enlisting opposition by members of the public that are harmed by them-- which could easily have a greater long term impact than the benefit of the standard. (and if it's argued that these changes have gone too far, then I'd say it's likely an example of exactly that).
This is a common problem with regulatory agencies. They're created to address some real problem, but then they address it, and they still exist, so what are they supposed to do now?
Meanwhile the original rules were the low-hanging fruit. Originally some products were only 50% efficient, but the modern products are 90% efficient. Energy consumption fell from 300 W to 167 W. If you ask them to trim off another 133 watts, that's a violation of the laws of physics. If you ask them for the last 17 watts that are theoretically physically possible, that's not really a thing either. At best you can trim off another 5 W by making some onerous design trade offs that aren't worth five watts.
But what are they going to do if their job is to make new rules?
> Examples I've personally experienced is that many/most driers now available require multiple attempts to get clothes actually try.
You used so many heat pump dryers? They are fairly new. It sounds like you're generalising. A Indesit we had was crappy, our current Bosch 6 is fine but harder to clean the heat exchanger which had been improved in newer versions.
Well I think you might kind of be making my point-- not because I agree with you: I don't, I think man's ongoing impact on the atmosphere and climate is an important issue. And collectivist humanity is smart enough and wealthy enough to spare some resources on protecting our own future. But it's not an issue we're going to move the needle on with any amount of mandatory no-flow showerheads.
Intrusive regulation makes environmental concerns into people's enemy.
Because stuff costs money everyone already has an incentive to conserve. We can enhance that though lower impact methods like disclosure, monitoring, optional eco modes that can easily be disabled.
I suspect that considering the long term impact if there is virtually any public backlash these efforts are ultimately net negative.
My home appliances meet a number of international energy efficiency standards including those set by the EU. If the US wants that to be somebody else's responsibility that's ok; but China et el aren't going to invest in separate production lines without it just for the US.
"Someone" has a serious phobia regarding shower heads and gas stoves. My house came with a gas stove with three pilots that heat up the house on those 110 degree days and I can't find the shutoff (it's behind the stove somewhere) to shut the damn thing off without killing the furnace and water heater.
Consolation might be if I sell the abomination, some deranged (pun unintended) person may overpay for the nostalgia.
As for the alternative, PG&E more than doubled my electric rates, though I did get a stovetop Wolf oven, never having had an oven that was accurate. My former Breville quit one day after the warranty expired. I believe the cause was a 29 cent inline fuse buried between panels past about 30 screws holding the back on. I never found the fuse.
IMHO this is a good thing if it ends the now-common practice of chasing after tiny gains in efficiency at the cost of shortened lifespans and more difficult repair.
The list of specifications developed during the last administration have encouraged the sale of bathroom and kitchen faucets, residential toilets and sprinkler nozzles that just don’t work well.
I think that's been a problem since before the last administration...
These press releases chill me to the bone with how 1984 speak they are. I’ve never seen whole agencies just completely gutted and replaced with nonsense like this before. The executive branch of the government was never meant to have this much power. We didn’t fight a war against a king so that we could just devolve to that again.
It's not about quality, it's about reducing energy consumption, which is critical because ... climate change (among other things). Come on, I shouldn't need to explain this.
Trump wants to bring back incandescent lightbulbs. And burn more coal.
The problem was that at least for some categories, the regulations weren't making appliances actually more efficient any longer, but rather just gaming the numbers by skimping on their primary functionality. For example clothes washers that don't use enough water to get clothes clean (hot water is directly counted as energy use), or dishwashers that skip having a heating element for the dry cycle, and then substitute some combo of dodgy "rinse aid", humidity-absorbing crystals that regenerate by using heat from the water, and drip drying.
Don't get me wrong, being an electrical engineer, doing a lot of DIY repair, and taking note of what goes into appliances I've got zero faith in manufacturers to come up with more efficient solutions on their own. But at a certain point the ever-advancing regulations stopped being productive as well. You can only switch to ECM/brushless motors one time.
(Also a meta issue - if the actions of the Trump administration were limited to only executive branch domestic policies like this, we could at least readjust in four years)
Fair point. But gaming the regulations is a different problem, one that lies not with the regulations but with enforcement of standards. Taking away these new regulations doesn’t mean that some companies won’t still try to game other remaining regulations in order to cut corners and eke out more profits or for planned obsolescence.
I think the term "gaming" was overstating the point relative to my argument. What I see is that the previous regulations got a lot of the low hanging fruit, and now there aren't really big gains to be had like that.
I actually don't think companies will go backwards on improvements they've already adopted. The mechanism I see is a reluctance to spend design time on changing things (ie keep selling the same old shit), rather than pure cost optimization with newer technologies costing more.
I'd say a big cause of the problem here is the handwavey nature of regulations focusing on "high level" goals like efficiency and expecting that engineers can magically find it somewhere [0], rather than more direct things like "all appliance motors that consume more than 5% of the energy used by the appliance must be brushless ECM"
[0] similarly, see the repeated calls for magical encryption backdoors that don't weaken security
Energy efficiency is a quality metric. Come on, I shouldn't need to explain this.
Even if you disagree with that for some reason, it doesn't really affect my point. It's a tradeoff and they want different rules about what options on the tradeoff curve are valid.
> It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves.
So do you think the claim that it's cheaper to build to looser standards is a lie, or do you think cheaper appliances did not play any role in motivating this order and only came up after the fact?
I'm pretty sure at least one of those has to be true for your claim to be true, and I'm quite skeptical of both.
(If you said it was mostly about climate change spite I'd be a lot more likely to believe you.)
> > It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves.
>
> So do you think the claim that it's cheaper to build to looser standards is a lie, or do you think cheaper appliances did not play any role in motivating this order and only came up after the fact?
That's not what the government title claimed though. They claim cheaper prices. You likely know, cheaper production prices don't necessarily lead to cheaper consumer prices. Moreover, often reduced quality/efficiency actually results in higher lifetime costs, something which is often difficult to ascertain for consumers (one reason for regulations).
It _may_ be cheaper to build to lower energy efficiency depending on the product and the supply chain. This _may_ result in lower prices.
I do think the promise of cheaper appliances in indeed a cover for the primary target: rolling back climate change related regulation. Remember Trump’s first term? He spent a lot of effort trying to undo whatever Obama had done , not because of the benefits but just because. You cannot underestimate how retaliatory Trump is.
But more specifically Trump has repeatedly made clear his disdain for climate change measures and climate science. What do you think “drill baby drill” is all about? Cheaper gas? Petroleum (coming out of the ground) is already about as cheap as it can get to profitable pump.
Check this out from today’s NYT:
> One discipline that has been targeted more specifically is climate science. President Trump has long downplayed the threats from human-caused global warming. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staff members have been ordered to comb their research awards for terms including “climate science,” “climate crisis,” “clean energy” and “pollution.”
They aren't suspending anything. They're postponing. Your second quoted sentence is consistent with your first unless you change the word "postpone" to "suspend" in your mind while you're reading it.
I'd be all in favor of removing thousands of individual regulations if they were replaced by a single rational carbon/pollution tax, but that is wishful thinking.
The title of the submission is nowhere in line with what the linked page even talks about. Flagging for out right lying.
Titled when I wrote this comment is: "US Energy Department ending appliance efficiency standards"
All the press release mentions is that they are not moving forward on new standards that Biden was pushing for while he was in office. Existing energy efficiency standards for appliances are still in effect.
From the link: "will postpone the implementation of seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances.'
"Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules." Seems substantially correct. Although I agree it doesn't meet the usual standards for just copying the article's headline.
The article title is: "Energy Department Acts to Lower Prices and Increase Consumer Choice with Household Appliances", which says nothing of substance.
The only part of the article that explained what was done states: "Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules:"
Would a title of "US energy department indefinitely postpones efficiency standards for home appliances" sound less deceptive to you?
Thank you for doing this. Ever since the election there’s a concerted effort to exaggerate and mislead people. This site will go the way of Reddit unless people like you are paying attention and take action.
> The title of the submission is nowhere in line with what the linked page even talks about. Flagging for our right lying. All the press release mentions is that they are not moving forward on new standards that Biden was pushing for while he was in office. Existing energy efficiency standards for appliances are still in effect.
This is a very odd take. The title is based on the only part of the article that isn't PR fluff and describes what was done:
> Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules:
Central Air Conditioners
Clothes Washers and Dryers
General Service Lamps
Walk-In Coolers and Freezers
Gas Instantaneous Water Heaters
Commercial Refrigeration Equipment
Air Compressors
I can't change the title, but if it's worth changing, someone will do it or it will just be resubmitted.
I think "new" would make sense and I accidentally conflated them also writing about the EPA rolling back *existing* standards for other appliances in this article.
Arthur Rosenfeld was the driving force behind California and US energy conservation regulations in the 1970's and early 1980's. His direct personal impact on energy cost savings in the US is unbelievable, even before you inflation convert it to modern dollars.
Disassembling an old refrigerator from before the days of those yellow stickers is a mind blowing experience. Refrigerators commonly had heater wires attached to their outer panels. Why? It was cheaper to manufacture refrigerators that had heaters on their outer panels than refrigerators that had adequate insulation (the heaters prevented the outside of the refrigerator from getting cold enough to cause water to condense on the outside of the refrigerator). It was cheaper to make them with heater wires, but unbelievably more expensive to run them that way. Consumers paid a huge price for that tiny reduction in manufacturing cost, and had no way of knowing that was happening. Those yellow stickers changed that.
Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse? Show me another individual who has come anywhere close to the direct financial savings that Rosenfeld, a PhD Physicist, delivered.
The article below primarily talks about his impact on reducing California's spending on energy, in large part because it's easier to quantify, but his impact nationally is undoubtedly much higher.
[0]https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/27/art-rosenfeld-californ...
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