EPA Plans to Shut Down the Energy Star Program

No. I have several monitors of similar age, and their startup times vary significantly. It's a result of manufacturer choices, but not some nefarious impact of labels that tell you how much power a thing uses.

Doubtful, of my four displays only one behaves this way

How many various inputs does the display on your phone need to scan and handshake?

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

If you assume nothing has changed since 2010 then, sure. In reality, the Energy Star program changed their certification process that went into effect the following year - https://www.energystar.go.jp/news/news2010/pdf/etv_faq_20110.... A subsequent GAO report commended the pace of progress in implementing these changes. There have been many several changes to the program including a certification for new homes and apartments that was launched last year.

But of course, there is always a chance that this program was sunset to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse since the current head of the executive branch is notoriously anti-fraud.

You read one comment on Hacker News about a potential flaw in the system and that changed your mind? It doesn’t seem like you really gave it much thought before or thought about the other effects.

Many comments on Hacker News don’t strictly adhere to the rules and aren’t removed. Should they just shut down all of the moderation?

You should really look up how much the program costs vs how much it saves consumers each year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

>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?

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.

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.

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

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

> 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

The Energy Star label influences the low end of the market, making it so manufacturers will spend an extra dollar or two of parts cost on baseline models rather than reserving those "innovations" for premium models selling for many hundreds of dollars more.

The recent Energy Star requirements have gone horribly wrong for some things (eg dishwashers that no longer dry dishes because they omitted a drying heating element, clothes washers that fail to clean clothes because they skimped on water too much), but the basic idea is sound.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.