About 40% of total US energy consumption is used by household and industrial appliances, such as heating and cooling systems, refrigerators and lighting.
The issue is that projected efficiency gains are always in 10 years spans, be it solar panels, heat pumps, refrigerators, you name it. And majority of them never even hit that mark. So you pay way more upfront for a gain you might not actually ever get because the device will die before that and it’s not financially sustainable to repair it. Or it’s even impossible because parts are rarely available for that long.
Also energy ratings are often BS if you don’t read the fine print. Like, everyone is looking at washing machines that have A class energy rating, but no one read the fine print that it’s always measured on Eco programs that always run for 3 hours which everyone avoids and no one uses because it takes so damn long. Everyone is looking for 1 hour programs and those often need to push heaters, pumps and motors to achieve washing results in that time, effectively throwing the efficiency ratings out the window.
Yes, that sucks, I didn’t realize the standards were done like that, that should change. It still seems to me like the repairability and lifespan problems are in all modern appliances, and thus don’t specifically apply to more efficient ones, but from a financial perspective, if its that much extra, yeah, bad lifespan and repairability sucks even worse.
What we need is a shift in the industry towards prioritizing useful lifespan (which I imagine would be a bigger sustainability gain) more so than we need marginal efficiency gains.
The issue is that projected efficiency gains are always in 10 years spans, be it solar panels, heat pumps, refrigerators, you name it. And majority of them never even hit that mark. So you pay way more upfront for a gain you might not actually ever get because the device will die before that and it’s not financially sustainable to repair it. Or it’s even impossible because parts are rarely available for that long.
Also energy ratings are often BS if you don’t read the fine print. Like, everyone is looking at washing machines that have A class energy rating, but no one read the fine print that it’s always measured on Eco programs that always run for 3 hours which everyone avoids and no one uses because it takes so damn long. Everyone is looking for 1 hour programs and those often need to push heaters, pumps and motors to achieve washing results in that time, effectively throwing the efficiency ratings out the window.
Yes, that sucks, I didn’t realize the standards were done like that, that should change. It still seems to me like the repairability and lifespan problems are in all modern appliances, and thus don’t specifically apply to more efficient ones, but from a financial perspective, if its that much extra, yeah, bad lifespan and repairability sucks even worse. What we need is a shift in the industry towards prioritizing useful lifespan (which I imagine would be a bigger sustainability gain) more so than we need marginal efficiency gains.