Yes. 100%. Before energy star, refrigerators were made with heating coils glued to the outer panels because it was cheaper to warm the outside of the fridge to avoid condensation than it was to install adequate insulation inside the fridge. The operating cost of those lightly insulated fridges was much higher, but the parts cost was a few dollars lower. Energy star and those yellow power consumption stickers changed that.
> Before energy star, refrigerators were made with heating coils glued to the outer panels
Do you have any examples of such products? I don't believe I've ever seen one.
> it was cheaper to warm the outside of the fridge to avoid condensation
A refrigerator has an evaporator inside the fridge to get cold but it must have a condenser on the outside to discharge heat. The outside of the fridge is going to get warm no matter what you do. The only time I've seen an actual heater used is when a fridge is placed outside where temperatures go below freezing.
> but the parts cost was a few dollars lower.
The labor cost was also significantly lower and the rate of production was higher.
> than it was to install adequate insulation inside the fridge
They used to be insulated with cork and then fiberglass which were the common technologies for their time. As soon as foam became more prevalent they switched to that.
> Energy star and those yellow power consumption stickers changed that.
It normalized the patchwork system that existed before it. California, as always, experienced the initial problem and created it's own standards on refrigerators sold in the state. Other states followed, the federal government picked at it slightly, and finally Energy Star came into existence mostly by industry demand.
Thinner walls on the fridge would mean greater internal volume. If volume is the only performance metric available, designs would tend towards something like that to maximise sales.
That's all in theory though. I wonder if this could be a confusion arising from the use of heating coils to defrost the evaporator coil (auto-defrost). that's a different thing though.
Without Energy Star or regulations, what incentive do manufacturers have to display this information, and display it accurately? Consumers cannot hold manufacturers accountable. Even boycotts are under legal scrutiny. Our only option are class action lawsuits, which take years or longer and can be considered a cost of doing business, and have been stymied by binding arbitration contracts.
What is accurately? The efficiency of the product will depend on how full it is. The less mass you have inside it the more often it turns on and the more energy it consumes.
So do consumers even understand this particular point of their device? Or how their use case may impact the displayed numbers?
The point of standards and standardised evaluations is to come up with a measurement methodology which is consistent across units tested and testing sessions.
The Energy Star Test Procedures for refrigerators and freezers is defined in this document:
Refrigerators and freezers are tested unloaded. Which suggests that the Energy Star programme should report a less efficient energy usage as compared with normal loading of a refrigerator/freezer, which will reduce air exchange and the need to re-cool air.
They have none, which is why you don't ask the manufacturers to do that. You rely on other parties who make money by helping you choose between what products to buy (i.e. reviewers), as you do for any other dimension other than Energy Star ratings.
Even with regulations like Energy Star, you can't just assume they're being followed accurately. It's much easier for companies to game one government-run system than a whole ecosystem of reviewers who are competing on the accuracy of their reviews.
You don't have to buy a subscription to anything. You're welcome to make a purchasing decision in any way you want, including ways that are free like word of mouth.
What a weird world where only certain people are allowed the privilege of information via money rather than enforcement thru the government to level the access.
People trust word of mouth much more than other sources of information. That's probably because the person giving you a recommendation has social skin in the game (if they're talking smack you won't trust them again in future), and no conflicts of interest.
Versus asking the manufacturer ("very efficient sir") or the government ("efficient and we ignored every other aspect of the product so it might not actually work", see the dishwasher discussion).
The problem is that close to zero consumers are actually verifying this stuff.
We need actual regulations in place to display accurate information because otherwise you can just lie, and that's that. How many people do you think are actually testing the power usage of their appliances under different scenarios?
If Billy Joe says it's efficient and you trust him, you could be getting ripped off and never know it.
It's very similar to nutritional information as required by the FDA. Testing food is expensive, and even if you could, since you're not the manufacturer you'll never know what ingredients actually go into it. Only they know.
It's just significantly cheaper in aggregate to have the government tell manufacturers to list information they already have. Rather than have a potentially infinite number of random parties try to figure it out with their limited information.
There are already plenty of laws in place to prevent false claims about products during a sale, so even if EnergyStar doesn't exist you can't just lie about energy consumption and be legal.
But you guys are all making very bad assumptions about these kinds of government programmes. There is no "EnergyStar police". Read the GAO report linked further down: when they investigated it, they found the government doesn't actually test anything. They just assumed that anything the manufacturers said was true, and had been doing so for decades. They're very likely still doing that.
Professional product reviewers don't make this elementary mistake but the people who work on these programmes have protected jobs and no incentive to do it well. Hence the zany results. You don't see well known product review magazines signing off on gas-powered alarm clocks, right?
> If Billy Joe says it's efficient and you trust him, you could be getting ripped off and never know it.
Ditto if Billy Joe is a civil servant, except the real Billy Joe doesn't force you to pay him for his advice, and the real Billy Joe probably isn't just blindly repeating stuff he read in the manufacturer's instructions whilst claiming it's his own opinion.
> It's just significantly cheaper in aggregate to have the government tell manufacturers to list information they already have.
They don't already have it because such certifications require highly specific testing setups that don't necessarily match what real customers care about. It also tends to yield a lot of specification gaming.
But there's a bigger problem with all of this. The US government deficit is so huge that to even preserve a government that even barely resembles the one you have now, absolutely everything has to be cut if it's not core functionality. To put this in perspective, you could zero your military budget tomorrow - literally fire everyone in the DoD and scrap every piece of equipment - and the USG would still spend more than half a trillion dollars in excess of revenue.
Americans have no idea what austerity means. Not only will you have to scrap all the fiddly unnecessary stuff around the edges like EnergyStar, you will also have to make huge cuts to the military and pensions and other forms of welfare. People won't accept the latter without the former. Otherwise, you get endless stories in the press of the form "I've been pushed into poverty by cuts in X welfare programme whilst the government pays civil servants to review toasters all day". Ask Europeans whose countries have been through even quite mild austerity what it's like. Everyone in this thread is re-arranging the deckchairs whilst the Titanic is holed below the waterline.
> so even if EnergyStar doesn't exist you can't just lie about energy consumption and be legal.
Right, but you can just not include that information at all. Which is both cheaper for the manufacturer and advantageous for them.
Or, do you one better, you can include vague claims that you can argue don't mean anything. Sort of like "natural" on food. That word means absolutely nothing. Still plastered across food and consumers think it means something.
Also, on the topic of deficit: no, I reject this notion. It's just conservative populist propaganda that we have to burn it all down otherwise the US implodes.
Until you, and other's, start proposing wealth taxes, I don't give a shit what you think about the deficit. Sorry, I don't, so don't waste your breath.
People trust all kinds of nonsense they shouldn’t.
You want to talk about word of mouth? I’ve never heard anyone complain about dishwashers except from the people on here who have a libertarian axe to grind.
Agreed that technical specs cannot easily be crowdsourced. And even comprehensive reviews quickly get outdated when new products release. I remember there used to be a Google engineer who would review USB-C cables on Amazon for compliance.[0] After looking at this again Amazon apparently ended up banning the sale of out of spec cables altogether. That kind of thing is the only real way to protect consumers. We can't rely on Google engineers to leave reviews for our products on Amazon. I do think products with clearly defined technical specs should in general be reported to the consumer. Same thing with nutrition labels.
The lower the skill needed to evaluate something and the more well defined the problem space is, the easier it is to crowd source. For example Open Street Map works because the barrier to entry is relatively low and new cities aren't coming out every day. Similarly IMDB has a section that allows users to give their own parental rating to movies with their own explanation. That can compete with MPA film ratings because again the barrier to entry is low and movies don't change after they are released (in general).
> I do think products with clearly defined technical specs should in general be reported to the consumer.
A historic example is things was Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. The exact same product number had completely different amounts of memory and core chipsets.
Another one that's common is the first batch of particular SSDs in a model contain more/faster/any cache which gets good benchmarks and great reviews, but later neutered releases of the same 'model' perform like crap.
Largely it's just worked. Products on the market are almost all efficient now because it's blatantly displayed on the front.
The most obvious difference left is on fridges. The amount of power consumed varies quite a lot and in ways that are not obvious. Small fridges use a shocking amount of power because they use less efficient coolers without compressors.
My old pool pump used more energy than my new pool pump and it’s cheaper to pay me to replace it versus future generation and emissions by continuing to use a less efficient applicance. I paid $2000 for the new pump, and the utility only offset $350 of that.
Energy efficiency is why US electric consumption has been flat for so long (since 2008). Besides lighting, most residential load are appliances (refrigerator, washer, dryer, stove, microwave, pool pumps, TVs, water heater) or HVAC. So, those are the efficiency targets. The cheapest kWh is the one you didn’t have to generate and deliver. Very similar to demand response, where you pay consumers to shed non essential electrical loads (nest thermostat rush house rewards is an example of this) when the grid is at capacity.
Similar incentives exist for heat pumps, water heaters, and dryers, as well as for disposing of an old inefficient fridge you might be hanging on to in your garage as a second unit.
The link actually provides some insight into this. It's from TECO, a Florida based electric company. In Florida (and maybe the rest of the US south, idk), a lot of houses have pools and the pumps for those run for hours every day.
Even if you don't want to use the pool, if the house has a pool the pump needs to run regularly with filtration and chlorination or else you end up with an expensive, putrid mess to clean up.
And of course in most parts of florida you can't drain the pool long term because of how high the water table is. An empty pool is just a concrete shell so without the weight from the water inside it, the pool essentially becomes boyant and tries to float upwards out of the ground, causing potentially thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
So a lot of people are stuck with pools with the water in them. So they are stuck with the pumps running.
And regardless of how recreational those pools are, that means a lot of pumps running across the state and that translates into a lot of power usage during the day.
So rebates for upgrading to more efficient pumps is an easy way to reduce power usage, reduce costs for people, reduce environmental costs, and reduce unnecessary overall load on the grid.
It's an incentive that just makes sense for everyone involved because it provides benefits across the board.
Indeed, I am stuck with the pool because it was there when I bought the house and filling in the pool can be detrimental to the value of the property (it is a disclosure item when selling). Therefore, I must continue to service the pool to maintain the value of the property. Had the property not had a pool when I acquired it, I would not have installed one.
Presumably they do. GP is questioning if it even benefits the environment. (Edit: for reasons specifically related to it being rebates for a pool pump. In most parts of the world a private pool is a symbol of excess and waste, and the GP remarked on how they use less energy by not having one at all).
It’s fairly straightforward to understand that energy efficiency programs offset combustion generation emissions through avoided energy use. It would’ve taken GP one glance at Wikipedia, if questioning the environment benefits.
> More than 75 product categories are eligible for the ENERGY STAR label, including appliances, electronics, lighting, heating and cooling systems, and commercial equipment such as food service products. In the United States, the ENERGY STAR label often appears with the EnergyGuide label of eligible appliances to highlight energy-efficient products and compare energy use and operating costs.
> One of the most successful voluntary initiatives introduced by the U.S. government, the program has saved 5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, more than US$500 billion in energy costs, and prevented 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Elements of the ENERGY STAR program are implemented in Canada, Japan, and Switzerland.
No - your utility used energy star compliance as an easy yes/no for giving you a rebate, but it could still give out rebates without energy star based on a couple of simple specs.
I think Energy Star (and similar state programs) has driven companies to increase efficiency in many products even if you don't care. (Unfortunately some of the "improvements" have been fake, like dishwashers that don't wash, and this has justifiably turned some people against the program.)
Citation for dishwashers that don't wash. After switching back to dishwash powders (away from tablets -- which I learnt through a Technology Connections video basically don't work since it gets dissolved in the 10mins rinse cycle of most dishwashers) I've yet to have a bad dishwasher experience using powders which gets inserted into the wash cycle (and not the rinse cycle). Even the dirt cheap dishwasher I got as a package with my new house has no issues cleaning close to 100% of dishes on the first try, every single run. Everyone I know that complaints are tablet users and every time I point this out, I get a shrugs "too hard to use powder -- easy to just load a tablet and run it again a second time if I have to". Energy Star has been great on improving the energy efficiency of dishwashes -- we now need the same standard for the chemicals we put into the dishwashers! Banning tablets would be a great improvement IMHO but don't think we'll see that happening.
> Citation for dishwashers that don't wash. After switching back to dishwash powders (away from tablets -- which I learnt through a Technology Connections video basically don't work since it gets dissolved in the 10mins rinse cycle of most dishwashers) I've yet to have a bad dishwasher experience using powders which gets inserted into the wash cycle (and not the rinse cycle).
I don't understand how the tablets could be in rinse cycle but powder in wash cycle? They both go to the same container that fully flips open during the wash cycle. Or do you have a device that has some different compartment for powder?
Colour me 'confused', as well. I expect that Rinse happens after Wash. So, if you put a tablet directly in the machine, it should be gone before rinse. Or maybe people mean some kind of Pre-wash Rinse?
Most machines have two containers, one that is exposed immediately and one with a flap that pops open. And if they don't you can just chuck some powder in loose in the machine.
Yes, but that's not what the parent was talking about. They said the tablet dissolves in the rinse cycle. Only way that would happen is if someone chucks the tablet inside the machine, instead of the detergent container where it should go.
Most tablets I've seen recommend putting it inside the washing machine, normally in the area where you put your knifes forks etc. This means it gets dissolved in the rinse cycle. Most machines I've used have dispensers that are too small for tablets to fit into so these can only really be used with powder.
I watched the video out of interest and it seems like that would only happen if you didn't use the dispenser flap. If you use tablets the only thing you miss is pre-washing. The argument is that cheap powder is just as good and it's got the same ingredients.
It sounds like a more important step (if you're plumbed into the hot line) is to run your water just before the first cycle so that the machine fills with the hottest water it can get, as not all of them will heat initially.
I don't do the hot water trick and it still works fine for me. Not 100% sure but I think my dishwasher heats it's own water rather than relying on an external hot water supply so possibly that is why.
I've never had a problem with the tablets. The ones I use look like the powder is just compressed into tablet form. I do have a more expensive model, the only reason I go for the pricier ones is the noise level - don't really care for any of the other "features".
I've watched it, I watch all his stuff. I like his humour.
I don't live in the US. He does talk about some differences. For example, I've never had a dishwasher here that didn't heat it's own water.
I did live briefly in the US and I recall that there were a bunch of subtle differences around appliances. Europe, Australia and New Zealand use the same models and the US gets different models.
Neither do I, I live in New Zealand. Agree that I found it odd that US dishwashers don't heat their own water but the rest of the video still seem relevant to NZ. The powder recommendation being the biggest take home for me.
To be fair I don't even know where to buy dishwasher powder or gel. I am in the EU and have literally never seen it in any supermarket. I'd buy it if it was available but I don't think I can anywhere.
They are always available next to tablets in supermarkets here in New Zealand. Interesting to see this regional variation. Normally powders are in bottles. We get both the global Finnish brand here as well as local brands.
I’ve made purchasing decisions based on TCO projections from the yellow Energy Guide stickers (managed by the FTC). I’ve never knowingly made one based on the blue Energy Star stickers. (However if some kickback or tax credit scheme depended on those stickers, then I may have made a decision influenced by the kickback and therefore by the Energy Star sticker.)
One particular example was a tradeoff calculation for water heaters. I forget what the exact TCO tradeoff point was but it was ridiculously short (between 1-2 years). I was replacing a leaking/failed heater and expected it to be shortly thereafter replaced due to a basement remodel we had planned. I bought the best insulated one as it saved money if we used it for just 2 years. 16 years later, that unit failed (we didn’t do the planned remodel). That was based on the FTC sticker only (plus my actual gas rates).
Edit to add: we then replaced that water heater with an electric heat pump water heater (which is eligible for the IRS tax credit scheme, which requires they "must meet or exceed the highest efficiency tier (not including any advanced tier) established by the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE)") and all of the EPA Energy Star rated heat pump ones do, but I'd argue that the heater would still carry the highest CEE rating with or without the Energy Star program, so I still didn't purchase based solely or primarily on any factor that the star under-pinned, but if there was a heat pump water heater that didn't have the sticker, I'd have had to look to be sure it was still eligible for the rebate.
Absolutely! I plan to buy a mini split, and efficiency is the biggest driver after properly sizing the unit for my space. Energy costs add up when you live where your air conditioner can run non-stop for months at a time.
Bad faith argument, and certainly not the case for homeowners intending to leverage certain tax incentives[1].
When I tapped this two years ago, it was for a ducted heat pump system replacement where the only immutable requirement was that the system had to have earned the ENERGY STAR label. SEER2 rating was a mere secondary consideration that had no impact on credit qualification; 14.8 was my saddle point.
At the time, ductless mini-splits had to be ENERGY STAR certified and SEER2 > 16 to qualify.
Isn't the yellow energy star label what generally gets the SEER rating put front and center on a product instead of hidden on whatever page of the spec sheet/manual?
generally its not energy star, but online reviews/audits of efficiency under various scenarios. Just like how for EVs we don't generally use MPGe but the range tests from YouTube & Blog reviewers.
Forgive my ignorance as a EU customer, but how would you trust the power/efficiency claims without independent certification? (I suppose that's what the energystar is supposed to provide)
I'll filter appliances at big box stores by Energy Star, and then will side by side the run cost per year estimates. Do people NOT utilize Energy Star when making purchasing decisions?
I don't think I ever have. I've gone by customer and professional reviews, physical size, presence of features and anti-features (I won't get anything IoT-ified), but the energy star rating hasn't ever been a factor.
I honestly don't remember for sure, but I have a vague impression of "significant difference in energy star rating is outweighed by significant difference in purchase price". Could be that was just the particular type of appliance years ago, though.
Just for kicks I thought I'd look around to see how my memory was, and I realized I was thinking of the yellow energy guide numbers.
Since there's no numbers attached to the energy star certification itself, it's a meaningless label that doesn't really tell what the difference is. With the energy guide labels, at least there's a point of comparison.
Even then, the difference between models of a few types of appliances I checked were typically in the 1-3% of the product cost range. The single biggest I could find online happened to be in TVs, where one brand's 65" was half the estimated annual electric cost of another- a savings of $20 per year! It'd pay for the difference in price between the models in 3 years, and pay for itself in 25!
Granted, I didn't see numbers for the likely worst offenders: central air conditioning and electric ovens.
Not all appliances I looked at were energy star certified.
The energy guide (yellow label with cost estimates) is mandatory for most appliances. The energy efficiency is quantified as an estimated annual cost of operation.
Energy star certification is a voluntary and binary thing. There's no readily visible difference between appliances with or without the energy star certification, short of going back to the energy guide label to compare.
I repeat, the system worked, and manufacturers starting engineering energy efficiency into all their lines.
There are knock on effects like economies of scale making energy efficient parts cheaper to source, marketing the latest technology driving consumer expectations, and manufacturers flat out copying each others’ designs.
A few years ago I needed a fridge for my hobby space. One where I could store various substances that I didn’t want stored by my food.
I was originally looking for a mini fridge like what you’d think of belonging in an American dorm room. In the store, I noticed the medium sized fridges (more akin to what one might think of in a European studio apartment) actually used less energy according to the yellow sticker, so I went with that.
This was a case where I wasn’t really looking for anything very specific, though, so it’s not like I was already limited in options and limited more by that sticker.
Sometimes I do a TCO analysis by subtracting the energy savings over 7 years (or 5, or 10 or whatever I estimate the useful life to be) from the more expensive price of the more energy efficient product. Occasionally it comes out less than the cheaper product.
I will be honest, I have long assumed everything in the store has Energy Star on it, and I am sorta doubtful companies will deliberately make less efficient appliances if it goes away.
But it also seems like one of those things that surely doesn't cost much to keep around either. Getting rid of it is just virtue signaling to anti-climate people.
That reminds me of a moment in maybe 90ies when somebody in the local government over here was advocating to close the weather institute because you can just get weather news from TV anyway. That at least had a clear motive -- institute in question was located in a very nice location with a view and there was a line of developers forming to bribe said official and his colleges to get it for pennies and sell some nice apartments there.
>...I am sorta doubtful companies will deliberately make less efficient appliances if it goes away.
Working in the manufacturing space, I have no doubt designs will change and energy consumption will go up. They will be able to remove sensors, heat water hotter in dishwashers and clothes washers, run cycles more aggressively, and use cheaper motors (such as HVAC fans). Any item you can remove from the bill of materials adds to the profit directly.
Capital expenditure versus operating expenditure is a common tradeoff discussed in a business sense, and the Energy Star gave a pretty darn good comparison for opex for consumers. Taking that away (even with some of the games that have been played over the years) is a huge loss for consumers.
Flip side of this is that every one of these regulatory rollbacks will get challenged in court as arbitrary and capricious (after all, no more Chevron), reinstated by the next Democratic administration anyway, and possibly not even be functionally repealed (creating potential liability down the road), so at least for a while manufacturers will probably continue to act as if the standards are still in effect.
This, of course, is exactly the kind of chaos and uncertainty that the APA and all those agency processes are supposed to prevent, but it’s a roller coaster for the next few years at least.
Isn't it a huge selling point though that new appliances are more efficient? Like... a lot of people have old appliances that... basically work, and the fact that you might make a lot of that cost back in efficiency savings is one of the heavy incentives behind sales.
I'd agree Energy Star requires presenting that, but I feel like a lot of manufacturers would want to.
(As opposed to efficiency/power cost/TCO in general, specifically refusing to buy non-logoed goods)