EPA Plans to Shut Down the Energy Star Program

I think you'll find this is a result of the phosphate ban in the 90s. Detergent got less effective, so cycle times got longer to compensate. Same problem with clothes washers. A spoonfull of trisodium phosphate goes a long way, as long as you're ok with algae blooms downstream.

New dishwashers take a long time because they can be more energy and water efficient if they leave more time for detergents to degrade grease and the other stuff on dishes. If you don't have the time to wait for a slow cycle you use a fast one with the usual tradeoff of time vs money.

Your whole premise is wrong. Energy star doesn't make a company do anything besides disclosure.

> manufacturers don't have any incentive to start producing power-guzzling appliances when power costs are increasing

That's only true if customers can know how much energy their devices are going to use. Energy star forces that disclosure and that's it. Market forces are done everything else. Consumers prefer lower energy costs and devices that voluntarily achieve an energy star certification

Also, "takes like 4 hours to finish a load", I have a new dishwasher, there is no combination of settings (except adding a delay) that will make a load take four hours. Max I can get is 2:36

You’re getting downvoted because you’re making a few mistakes. 1) Energy Star is not a mandate, it’s a certificate if you want it. 25% of dishwashers are not ES at Home Depot. 2) Dishwashers are slow for a few reasons, a big one is gov’t stopped use of strong detergents. The new one needs time to dissolve foods. 3) “why solve X when Y is still a problem” is always a weak argument. 4) “markets will solve it” doesn’t always work because the individual cost of an energy guzzling appliance is a few extra dollars, but the collective cost is high.

The difference between appliances in 1970 vs now is immense. My dishwasher is so quiet we double check if it’s on. It uses less water than handwashing. Even the Chamber of Commerce (big business lobby) asked them to keep Energy Star.

False; my brand new dishwasher from Bosch takes approximately two hours and ten minutes to complete a load of dishes on the standard mode.

EnergyStar on GPUs wouldn’t be that bad nowadays!

Why is it that every time libertarians win a victory for my freedom my life gets harder and worse?

The problem is manufacturers also have no incentives to display the information EnergyStar provides if not forced to do so.

And sure Americans care about energy costs but looking at the car market you can see Americans don’t actually care to make choices that save them money in the long run. Ford doesn’t even produce sedans anymore.

You made the same comment 5 hours ago [0] in the same thread. Accidental duplication?

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912989

That sounds like Lenovo just being bad? Certainly they could fix the issue but instead chose the cheaper option.

Interesting. I had similar things from other machines, and the solution is to keep a silent audio file playing in the background at all times, then there is no latency.

AFAICT my MBP M1 is energy star certified but has no such issue. Might it just be that the Lenovo has a bad implementation?

I've had problems with modern monitors shutting themselves off if they don't detect a signal in something like five or ten seconds, which is far too short when I'm trying to debug a PC having boot issues, configure a multi-monitor setup (like a 3-screen virtual pinball cabinet) or even just figure out which HDMI cable is which on the PC end. I don't mind the auto-off feature but the incredibly short time period is unnecessary and the delay time isn't adjustable (at least on the LG monitors I have).

This over-aggressiveness turns a good feature into a problem forcing me to completely disable power saving. Which is sad because the biggest savings of the feature are when a screen is left on for hours when the PC is off or disconnected (which I don't do anyway, as the entire system is on a smart power strip). A monitor should hunt for a valid signal for at least 45 or 60 seconds by default before auto-offing itself.

Another "power saving gone awry" issue is that USB selective suspend can cause wireless mice to stutter after not moving for just a few seconds. I think this is due to lag in the wake-up time. Unfortunately, the interface doesn't have any time adjustment, so I have to just turn selective suspend.

> It saves people money. Less spent on electric bills and tax money can be used elsewhere.

This is what they claim. The reality is a much different.

Every couple days I get a pretty blatant spam email in my inbox. It's frustrating that gmail's spam filter doesn't catch these, especially since I recall it working better in the past. But I'm not going to turn off the filter because it still catches dozens of spam emails a day.

Showing that a system has flaws doesn't necessarily prove that a system is useless. You have to look at the overall impact. In cases where you have an imperfect but useful system (such as most government regulation and enforcement) finding vulnerabilities is an important part of improving the system. A police department which only catches some murderers should work on catching more criminals rather than deciding it's hopeless and we might as well make homicide legal.

Overall levels of fraud are almost by definition hard to measure precisely. Demanding precision is simply a way to duck the issue. It's easier to precisely measure red teaming efforts, because then you know the denominator.

There is no incentive to run these programmes well and no downside to failing so you should assume fraud is rampant. When the GAO got a gas-powered alarm clock approved, who in the department lost their jobs? Did the head of the EPA get fired? Did they all lose their bonuses? No, they held a meeting where they claimed it didn't matter because the industry self-polices.

It's easy and more direct for Consumer Reports style companies to measure energy consumption themselves, instead of assuming that the producer's self-reports are fully accurate because there's a regulator who may or may not be paying attention.

The USA are freeriding the benefits of EU's regulation, sounds like they (EU) should raise tariffs for that!

(if you can't tell whether that is sarcasm that might be because I also don't know)

You will most probably get a different version of the same product (cheaper and worse) compared to one sold in EU. It takes one market participant to do this and everyone else will have to follow, otherwise consumers will buy the cheapest one.

>First: Those numbers are all BS and have been for decades. If you want damp clothes, dirty dishes and refrigerated to within a blond one of the legal minimum food then you can trust the numbers. If you want your appliances to do their jobs in a satisfactory manner you're going to find yourself turning them up (whatever that means will vary by appliance) and consequently using a lot more energy.

I have had zero of these issues. Can you be more specific about when you have encountered them yourself?

Ref: https://www.energystar.gov/products/ask-the-experts/whats-di...

You are correct; I mistakenly assumed they were all administered under the same program.

Thanks! I read the article and a lot of these comments, and I was thinking the whole time that Energy Guide was going away. As long as Energy Guide is sticking around, I really don't care about the "Energy Star" specific item.

Not sure about that. Industry created, private energy efficiency programs have often been nothing more than industry cheerleaders.

Is there a single rocket certification program in any industry that is actually pro-consumer? I’m failing to think of an example.

Private industry cannot be trusted to act in any interest but their own bottom line.

Appliances can use less energy of the mfrs are encouraged to design that. Energy Star was that encouragement.

Here is a bright idea, keep the existing program that works and therefore we wouldn’t need some mythical private certification program that doesn’t exist and probably be a scam if it did.

> I don't see how shutting down this program would affect costs

> Plus, a private certification program could easily fill in the void.

Ah there’s your problem. It turns out private solutions actually cost money, and relying on a private certification program to “fill the void” as you say, is what actually changes the costs.

Alternatively if you believe that private corporate actions are always free when comparing it to government services, then this is a net zero change

It won't necessarily affect purchase costs but it could affect operating costs.

When I needed a new washing machine a year or so ago there were many machines that were very similar except for large variations in energy efficiency. If it weren't for the Energy Star labels I almost certainly would have ended up with a machine with higher operating costs.

And migrate off oil consumption as much as possible while energy is cheaper (to bootstrap manufacturing/construction of other energy production systems). If the costs are down now because of OPEC+, then they'll go up. That's when we want to be able to sell (improving our trade deficit, a stated goal of this administration) to other countries. The US is the world's largest oil consumer, we consume 50% more than China. If we reduced our rate of consumption we could shift more towards exporting and be the ones controlling prices, since the US is also the biggest producer.

Meh, extraction of commodities is always cyclical. They'll be a glut, domestic producers will take a beating, OPEC will jack up the price, and then the domestic producers will bounce back. It has ever been thus.

Oof. My pool pump uses 0 watts, do I qualify?

Not sure actively subsidizing recreational novelty uses of electricity is doing anything to save the planet

> because of energy star.

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.

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.

Same

> 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.

A fridge is a heat pump, and there’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics. A fridge cools your food by warming your room.

Anything that stands in the way of a fridge expelling heat to its environment will make it less efficient.

Yep, even if the EnergyStar label goes away, I'm going to want this data when making a purchase to get an idea of long term costs.

Article claims it costs $32M a year, which is effectively free relative to the cost of the remaining government.

>...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.

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.

Also extremely loud water heaters.

Your point is still largely true, but it is worth noting that, in the age of social media, the customer tail can wag the corporate dog.

See: Bud Light.

> and display it accurately?

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?

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.

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.

Let’s be honest - you’re going to buy a mini split based on its capacity and SEER rating, not an energy star label.

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.

I do the same.

Now is a good time to read The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner.

Yeah, it's a weird situation with the current administration because they're clearly on a revenge tour and it will be hard to predict what their actual government will look like once they cool off. They're still acting like the opposition party and if they keep this up for all four years they might remain as such.