Serious question: has anyone here ever based a purchasing decision on energy star labelling?
(As opposed to efficiency/power cost/TCO in general, specifically refusing to buy non-logoed goods)
(As opposed to efficiency/power cost/TCO in general, specifically refusing to buy non-logoed goods)
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.
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.
Anything that stands in the way of a fridge expelling heat to its environment will make it less efficient.
See: Bud Light.
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).
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.
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 Energy Star Test Procedures for refrigerators and freezers is defined in this document:
<https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/specs/ENERGY%...> [PDF]
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.
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.
…only it’s better than a tax because it preserves the freedom to get ripped off if you choose. Yay freedom.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because of Energy Star that gap has generally shrunk, but that just means it’s working well.
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.
This is only true of the tiniest fridges, the peltier effect ones that are about the size of a milk crate. Your typical mini fridge has a compressor.
https://www.tampaelectric.com/residential/saveenergy/energys...
Not sure actively subsidizing recreational novelty uses of electricity is doing anything to save the planet
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star
> 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.
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.
If that recreational novelty is going to happen regardless, isn’t it better to entice people to do it with lower energy use?
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Energy Star is the blue and white label stickers granted to products meeting some energy efficiency levels and is managed by the EPA.
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.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
This includes every major appliance in my primary home...and HEPA air cleaners too.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Energy costs over the lifetime of many appliances types are many multiples of initial purchase price.
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.
Institutional collapse is a thing.
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.
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.
I'd agree Energy Star requires presenting that, but I feel like a lot of manufacturers would want to.