Climate Realism
Jim Lakely
New rules from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy will make most of the ordinary appliances in your home contraband. Thanks to useless, expensive, and unnecessary new energy efficiency standards, your washing machine will work harder and not get your clothes as clean, your dishwasher will not get your dishes as clean, and your refrigerator will not perform as you expect. And your gas stove? Hold on to it and find a good repairman. Those are on the outs, too.
The Biden administration says these new rules will save you money (it won’t) and save the planet (it won’t). This government sees absolutely no limits on its desire to run every aspect of our lives, no matter how small.
Here’s the story I’m commenting on:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/7/bidens-avalanche-of-energy-rules-hits-manufacturer/
Learn more about The Heartland Institute and our work to oppose government overreach and support climate and energy realism here:
https://www.heartland.org/index.html
SUPPORT OUR WORK by becoming a donor:
https://heartland.org/donate/
It’s the same in the EU and the UK. Tighter and tighter rules and regulations designed to limit or stop the non-elite’s use of appliances. But not to worry, we can still buy and use private jets.
OT
Apparently drugs at the Whitehouse aren’t forbidden
Drugs at the Whitehouse are ForBiden
In Canada you can not purchase a normal 40, 60 or 100 watt incandescent bulb. The federal government didn’t ban them, that would interfere with provincial jurisdiction. They just decided to set energy efficiency standards for everything from bicycles to wood stoves, and if something didn’t rate, it become illegal for it to travel over a provincial boundary. Sneaky buggers. Common, ordinary Incandescent light bulbs didn’t make the grade, and Canada isn’t big enough for a manufacturer to survive with a market of only a single province, so poof, end of an industry. Now the bulbs, specialty incandescent or LED all seem to ship from China, and because container ships or so efficient, they must be all tall ships, pushed by dolphins or something.
And some of the said LEDs don’t last as long as the former inexpensive, safe, recyclable, Canadian manufactured incandescent bulbs.
So have fun.
There is usually a loophole on that one – most industrial safety regulations require the use of incandescent lightbulbs over rotating machinery to prevent “strobe” effects from making a rotating object appear stationary.
In Europe you can still buy incandescents from industrial suppliers – marked “industrial use only”.
I would be interested to know how a LED, operating from a DC supply, could create a strobe effect.
If the supply is using pulse width modulation to control brightness or multiple LEDs are being driven in a multiplex fashion where they aren’t all simultaneously illuminated. Watch some YouTube videos of newer vehicles with LED exterior lighting. Lots of flickering, same with many digital instrument panels.
You can also use your cell phone to take a movie of an LED lit scene.
They want to ban irreplaceable Chinese goods like the EU banned irreplaceable Russian oil, and they have no plan to replace them. This is Wall Street’s Economic War on China, but grass roots plebs think they are the ones behind it! Those evil Marxist Chinese, who only have ONE military base abroad! They keep to themselves! And bring peace!
But we want war!
I’ve seen cars with lights that flicker, unless you look directly at them.
They aren’t pure DC.
They rectify the AC half wave rectification for cheap bulbs, full wave rectification for better ones. Then they have to use a capacitor to filter the result. The bigger the cap, the better the filtering.
And all capacitors fail long before the LED does. Which is why you never get the rated LED life out of ANY LED bulb.
Every LED I’ve purchased has far outlasted any incandescent, and fluorescent twisty bulb.
LED’s have come a long way. I do not have issue with them as long as I can see a demo of the light projection before I buy, but by and large they are very good, and last much longer than incan’s.
So you like paying six times as much to light your home?
LEDs, contrary to your statement, last vastly longer than any incandescent light bulb – thousands of hours vs a couple of hundred. I stopped using incandescent lights a decade and a half ago, and I have had to replace maybe 2 lamps, vs the many dozens of lamps I would have replaced if incandescent. And I enjoy not paying more for electricity.
Not defending the proposed Biden admin efficiency rules at all – they’re dumb and not cost effective. But LEDs vs. incandescents is truly the low hanging fruit of energy efficiency.
The LED manufacturers are a bit sneaky with their warranty terms. Here is a snip from a Philips LED Bulb:
8.5W-100W, E26, Daylight
Average life (at 2.7 hrs/day)
51 year(s)
Lumen maintenance factor
70%
Nominal lifetime
50,000 hour(s)
Number of switch cycles
100,000
Note that the lifetime is based on 2.7 hrs/day which works out to 51 years!
If you leave it on 24/7 it is 5.7 years. It also loses brightness over time.
If you leave it on 24/7 it is 5.7 years
I haven’t had one last that long.
I have some that are over 10 years old.
I had some that didn’t last 2 years.
They didn’t go “out” like an old fashioned incandescent bulb, they just got dimmer and dimmer, it was like being a victim of “gaslighting.”
2.7 hours a day is a reasonable average.
Some of mine are on less than an hour a week.
You’re not married to my wife – some of our lights are on for every waking moment of every day!
consider reviewing the definition of the “lifespan” of an LED. It’s defined as the time it takes for 50% of them to no longer put out 70% of their rated lumens, or something close to that. At least incandescents had the dignity to go quickly. So your house just gradually gets darker without you realizing it. Also, up here in the upper midwest that extra 5/6 was very useful for most of the year. so much so that excel energy had to run around handing our free electric space heaters because their gas infrastructure couldn’t keep up with demand during a recent polar vortex.
Some lights are on so rarely it is never cost effective to replace incandescent with LED. (e.g. hall closet light, utility closet, etc.) I have had a garage incandescent and outdoor floods last over 18 years (might still be working, I moved away)
I put 4 LED bulbs in my garage in Wisconsin. In 2 years all 4 failed apparently due to the expansion/contraction (winter to summer) of materials causing the bulb to delaminate and fall off the base. I had previously used 4 200 watt commercial grade incandescent bulbs that lasted 10+ years.
Also I have several fixtures with built-in dimmers and now must use LED “Dimmable” bulbs. They don’t work well jumping randomly from dim to bright through about 1/2 the adjustable range. Very annoying.
On the topic of light bulb lifetimes (just for fun): http://centennialbulb.org/
I always bought incandescents rated for 130V, they lasted 10-15 years.
I’ve had some LEDs that lasted for years. Another brand, every bulb in the pack burned out in less than 3 months.
Yeah, sometimes hit or miss. I have two sets of track lights in our basement rental. I switched all of those from Halogen to LED (about 10 bulbs) 5 or so years ago, none have burned out.
Duane, it’s not that simple. LEDs have a theoretical advantage, but not 6x, and only when things work as they “should.”
By the way, my big beef with LEDs is in the auto industry. Looking in my rear view mirror at night, cars can smile at me or scowl at me because of LEDs; However, when a headlamp on my 2008 BMW went out, I could replace the lamp myself for about $10-15. Turn lamps even cheaper, about two dollars. My newer BMW has adaptive LED headlights. When one recently went out under warranty, the part cost $2,500, plus $1,500 labor to disassemble the front of the car, run diagnostics, etc. I could own a Kia Rio ($17,000 MSRP), but even one of those headlamp replacements would easily run $1,000-2,000, all for the sake of 0.0001 mpg performance improvement. The auto industry must develop plug-and-play LED units, or poor folks will be forced to “total” their cars whenever they lose a headlight, turn lamp or tail lamp! Idiot auto engineers! Out of warranty now, I thought to sell my newer BMW simply because of the eventual cost of headlight replacement!
At least in Cuba, the people can afford to keep their 1940s and 50s vintage cars running.
Three cheers for cheap Chinese crap. Enjoy it while you can. China is no longer the lowest wage country and the only thing keeping a lot of production in China is sunk costs.
A lot of manufacturing is coming back to the USofA. The reshoring trend seems to be robust in the States and not quite as much in Canada. link
So, I wouldn’t bet against LED light bulbs being produced in North America. The top LED chip manufacturer is American. link
With regard to appliances in general: I have faith that we’ll produce a generation of home appliance hackers. example
Automation will eventually make production in the U.S. economically sound. Regulations are the biggest hinderance to U.S. production facilities.
In the meantime, production has shifted to other Asian countries.
Number one there is no reason for the government to micro regulate our appliances. Number two lying about why you want to regulate our appliances should be against the law. Lying about it without even a lick of evidence is beyond disgraceful.
Bob, you ended your comment with, “Lying about it without even a lick of evidence is beyond disgraceful.”
We’re talking about politicians. Lying and disgraceful are unfortunately commonplace for them.
Regards,
Bob
A genetic requirement.
Thank God. Finally.
I’m going to keep a list of all the banned appliances with me whenever I go out with my wife: ‘Sorry honey that new dishwasher is illegal, we’ll have to keep our 3 year old dishwasher another decade at least. Honey, Joe Biden says if will save the planet.’
Wife: ‘He can go save another planet where the dishwashers aren’t white and all the other appliances are stainless. ‘
I guess we’ll be stuck with our 74 year old dishwasher until he dies.
What about Autocues? Maybe they aren’t classed as domestic appliances, but it would be really unkind to reduce the power of those Joe uses – he already has to squint.
“Energy Efficiency” Standards for Dishwashers, clothes dryers, washing machines etc. – manufacturers have warned that the standards mooted will produce appliances that will not do the job properly and will be recycled (run twice) to get the job done using more power overall as a result – a complete backfire on the intended outcome.
Efficiency standard for electric motors – without going into a long technical explanation squirrel cage motors have very poor starting torque – related to their degree of “slip” from synchronous – you can only improve the efficiency of these motors by reducing their “slip” but this also reduces their starting torque. So it may well come to pass that on replacing your 1kW “85% efficient motor” with a 95% efficient version you will need to use a 2kW motor in order to get it to start and your overall costs and energy use will actually increase.
As an engineer, I find it hugely irritating that politicians presume to tell engineers how to do their jobs – do they really believe engineers deliberately design inefficient equipment ? I believe – as an engineer – that we constantly try to produce and improve economical designs – therefore I can only come to the conclusion that political meddling will result in greater costs and inefficiencies.
“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem !”
Milton Friedman – the great economist.
I would go further and state that most government solutions are invariably a good deal worse (in terms of overall societal cost) than the original problem.
The regulations create jobs inside Government.
Now who doesn’t want a job like that?
Very expensive jobs that produce nothing and suck the life out of everybody and everything else.
(‘everything’ being the operative here – we are talking Planet Earth
But, what happens when everybody has a job like that – then what?
So next time you meet any Citizens of Ancient Rome – ask them to tell you about it.
Especially how they survived the ‘Dark Ages’
We’re very close already.
Science has gone dark – Climate, Blacks Holes, Ozone Holes, Gravity waves, dark matter – all = kindergarten-grade garbage and fantastical nonsense
Technology – Computer Models and ‘artificial intelligence’ are more pure garbage
Politics – witness France and Ukraine not least or US vs China. Also Bojo, Brandon, Macron, Trudeau pursuing the petty politics of the school playground =esp concerning Europe and Brexit
Personal relationships – where are all the babies, why so many divorces. Why so much sexual dysfunction?
Food = that folks (Government workers) actually think we can survive on a diet of sugar and sugar alone. OK, maybe perked up with toxic (vegetable) proteins and carcinogenic oils. Food now utterly devoid of Vitamins, Trace Elements and Micro-nutrients
Media and esp Social Media – the spawn of quite dysfunctional young male ‘geeks’ = young boys scared shitless by females (also each other) so they devised “computers” in order to ‘get’ their dysfunctional way
Police – paranoid for their own selves, shooting guns at teenagers in stopped cars and tractors while using black folks for trampolines and target practice. Yet, as per the London Met, riddled with racism and sex abuse
Medicine = $4 Trillion pa – just for sticky plasters, no actual cures or remedies and as dispensed by Gov. mandated doctors who have no hesitation in saying everybody else is A Quack out to steal your money!!!???
(Could you make that up)
Health – we ain’t living any longer than the Biblical 3 score plus 10 despite spending all that money while the last 10 yrs are spent living the life of a diaper-wearing cabbage
Someone decided dishwashers needed to use less water to save the planet or something. Then a genius in the next cubicle figured that with less water used, less drying time would save even more. Brilliant!
If memory serves correctly, this quote (paraphrased?) came from commentary about Energiewende: “Government identifies what it thinks is a problem and institutes policies to address or fix the problem, but that in reality, make the problem worse, thereby requiring government to establish new policies to fix the problems created by the first policies thus creating a downward spiral of government intervention that continuously makes problems worse”
Politicians are engineering dyslexic.
HT to Eric. 🍸
I don’t really disagree and certainly don’t see government as a solution to anything ever, but I would quibble on one point. Engineers are not constantly improving the products they design from the point of view of the end-user. They are constantly trying to optimize for profitability.
With over four decades experience in manufacturing I am pretty confident to state that most effort goes into reducing cost – labor, materials, services, capital, in order to offer a competitive price and make an optimal profit margin. This doesn’t always align with the interests of the consumer.
Consumers are not always fully rational actors with full access to relevant data. After we take cost out of our gizmo it might not last as long and/or might cost more to operate and/or cost more to maintain than a competitor’s gizmo. If the buyer can’t make a decision based on trustworthy data, very often they will decide based on price. It’s very hard to convince a buyer to pay 30% more to save money over 5 years, especially when selling consumer goods. The only datapoint they may be confident is accurate may be the price. As a result of factors they don’t know how to measure they may often make poor choices driven by price.
we have to remember that the manufacturers love these new rules – in fact they lobby for them.
what could be better for them than new rues which make people buy new machines?
its a con.
I don’t doubt established players like rules that are barriers to the entry of new players, but reduced effectiveness of new appliances will not make people replace old ones.
Now, appliances designed to fail sooner—like with say, lots of load-bearing plastic parts—that is totally within the manufacturers’ power. In my experience that has been their strategy for getting people to buy new machines. My mother had an electric kettle she bought in about 1968 which she got rid of forty years later because it “looked old-fashioned”. I have never bought an electric kettle in my life that the switch (always the switch) didn’t break within three years.
Quite what the Chinese do to make LED lightbulbs fail so quickly would be interesting to know. As No One pointed out above, they last barely as long as incandescents used to, in spite of labels claiming 30,000+ hours of operation. Is it cunningly designed-in short service life? Or is it an accidental side-effect of government regulation on the lead content of solder? Or what? I really want to know.
Chinese semiconductors, like LEDs, have lower quality manufacturing processes, which results in shorter life products. Things like thin spots in metal conductor traces and impurities in the doping of transistor PNP/NPN junctions. A great deal of the semiconductor manufacturing process is ensuring everything is very clean, physically and chemically.
The LED keeps working. It’s the driver electronics that fail.
It’s the driver electronics that fail.
Same end result: the bulb no longer works.
Since they aren’t repairable, it doesn’t matter why they fail, they still get tossed.
Planned obsolescence is inherent to modern manufacturing.
A refrigerator is now designed to last only five years while the 40 year old “inefficient” ones are still humming along.
Autos were one of the first to ignore constant improvement for durability thus leading to the Japanese manufacturers to gain popularity.
That is one of the great myths of modern day leftism.
If you spend the time to research the phrase, you will find that it originated in marketing and referred to the adding of features so that consumers would want to replace existing units with newer ones.
As to older units working longer, if modern units were built to the same standards, they would cost 3 or 4 times as much.
I fail to see the link to leftism.
Adding features may be a marketing tool but shorter working life of appliances is not. I cannot recall seeing ads for appliances featuring the need to replace them in five years.
If modern units were built to the same standards, such as using NEMA standard motors rather than European standard motors, the cost would maybe be another 20% over the cheap ones. The desired effect is to make the consumer buy more often.
People go to great lengths to acquire, maintain and restore American automobiles made prior to 1974 when government decided it should intervene into the manufacturing process with mandates. No one tries to do this with autos manufactured post 1974, it is a waste of effort.That should tell you something.
That’s the least of our worries with The Voice for them and shutup for us-
Australian misinformation law: Albanese government’s proposed laws (msn.com)
Yet another example of the penalty/cost the American people are paying for having a President sitting in the White House, that has no functioning brain and thus, is unable to know what nonsense he is putting his name to and instructing his administration to enact.
My washing machine was purchased around 1978.
Its BIG and powerful and still going strong (with one reconditioned timer mechanism) 🙂
Again, it is the younger generations that will suffer most from these cretinous rules.
And they are the ones that voted the cretins into power.
They won’t know any better so they’ll buy slow appliances and an EV and be happy-
EV batteries remain major challenge for insurers – UK’s Thatcham (msn.com)
Just as soon as the critical materials and components are forthcoming-
Chip wars: how semiconductors became a flashpoint in the US-China relationship (msn.com)
What are Gallium and Germanium and which countries are producers? | Reuters
My commercial Speed Queen washer runs on an electromechanical timer just like defrost fridges used to but I’ve got bad news for the Greenies with eco-appliances.
From your Thatcham link:
“Only around 1.65% of cars on Britain’s roads are electric, but Thatcham said EV-related insurance claims are already 25.5% more expensive than for fossil-fuel equivalents and take 14% longer to repair.”
How much of this additional cost is carried by premiums for EVs and how much is smeared across everyone else’s premiums, on the basis that an EV is more likely to be in collision with a non-EV than with another EV? However it is apportioned it’s more expense across the board.
Yes it will have to be reflected in EV premiums sooner or later. No doubt why Tesla have got into insurance for the benefit of owners although a bang up your gigacasting would be similar to a bang in the battery you’d expect.
How NOT to extract the 21700 cells from a Tesla Model 3 battery – YouTube
Que?
Where is it that you people buy LED light bulbs that don’t last but a month or two? I had one small GE spot lamp that failed early on – but that has been it so far!
I still have a couple CFLs that are operational. Maybe its the environment (mains lines subject to transients e.g. motor ‘load-dumps’, lighting strikes and the like) which take out these bulbs?
There were 12 halogen pot lights in my kitchen, changed to LED about 5 years ago, probably average 4 hours per day “on”. Have to change one about every month. Which means they average maybe a couple of thousand hours. They run cool enough you can write the changeout date on them. Highly variable lifetimes. They simply don’t perform as claimed.
Most of the bulbs that I have bought are still going strong after a decade. The only bulbs in my house that aren’t LED are those that only get turned on once or twice a month.
I’ve had one brand where every bulb in the pack burned out in less than 3 months. They came with a new ceiling fan for the kitchen. I replaced those bulbs with the ones I removed from the old kitchen fan. That was 4 years ago, and the old bulbs are still fine.
Like everything else, if you want quality you have to be willing to spend more up front.
I had a couple of batches of Walmart brand “Great Value” LED bulbs. The lifetimes were quite variable. Mean life was in the range of a year or more of possibly 8-10 hours per day (I keep date installed and date died statistics), but there were bulbs that lasted only a month. Even some brand names like GE and Sylvania didn’t appear to meet stated lives. I am now testing Duracell. Keep in mind the stated lifetime is a mean value and the variability is pretty large. One’s view of bulb performance might be biased toward recalling those bulbs that died in a month.
The CFLs were irritating because they were dark, slow to warm up, and contained mercury. For all the hand ringing about mercury from coal-fired power plants there was no concern about mercury liquid/vapor in these products.
While it’s purely subjective you’ll say here’s my personal and brutally honest assessment of LEDs a replacements for incandescents in general home illumination.
They’re mainly great but…they don’t last anything like claimed–at least a significant number of them don’t–and they exhibit wildly different aging characteristics.
I replaced nearly every lamp in this big rambling ranch with LEDs over a period of a year about three years ago. Different brands from different sources. Lots of different styles because there are lots of different types of lighting fixtures. About the only things not replaced with LEDs are long fluorescent tubes and select 3-way table lamps as there is no equivalent LED or anything else substitute that I have ever seen and they’re not used too often in this house anyhow as they are mainly in infrequently used “public” areas where they provide selectable accent/general illumination in a way perhaps only possible with those ridiculous “smart bulbs” or something.
Ridiculous because by now at least 10% and likely more like 15-18 have failed or are in the process of failing. “In process” is, invariably, flickering–sometimes it will illuminate–sometimes not as if it’s not screwed in properly but it is–and early on sometimes tightening-loosening the bulb seems to bring it back to life for a while. It a repeating process of failure that happens with different general shapes and types of bulbs from different manufacturers although I suspect every one of them originates in one country where quality control is an utter impossibility because the form of capitalism their brutal government has introduced is even more bloodthirsty and cutthroat than the US “robber barons” during the so-called “gilded age” and that’s really saying something as their sense of ethics–even the relatively ethical ones–would pretty much horrify anyone today–at least in the so-called “developed” nations.
And the other problem is their aging curve. Unlike incandescents that [seemed] to age in a way that the older they got they faster they aged–LEDs seem the opposite exhibiting a rapid and significant drop in output followed by a long and very gradual decrease. In other words if you really want something like a 75-watt equivalent get a 100-way [equivalent] LED because it will soon dim to around that of a new 75-watt :LED and then stay that way. And if you really needed a 100 watter then you’re kind of out of luck because it’s hard to find larger output equivalents and the ones I’ve managed to find tend to be the WORST when it comes to “sudden death syndrome.” At least 20%–probably higher. And this failure percentage seems to have no relation to frequency of use of the lamp either. And it’s not just rather sudden. And it seems to be continuing.
Maybe I just have bad luck, but again I mainly think LED lamps are great as replacements for incandescents in most applications and work in most existing fixtures. Not all however and I do greatly resent not having the choice because in September 2023 they are gone from the USA. Illegal to sell or import. Gone as residential/commercial illumination purposes save extremely specialized applications. They’re technically illegal now–since April but retailers have been given some time to shed their inventory before the only time you can legally buy them is yard sales and the like.
Oh. And since this phase out of incandescents was first promulgated well over a decade ago (maybe two by now) I haven’t replaced a single three-way lamp. But I bought a case of the best GEs. They said “don’t worry.” I detested the light from CFLs but tolerated them due to their low heat in some applications. I knew whatever replace would come that three-way incandescents would be essentially impossible to duplicate and were actually among the most useful of all the “specialty” lamps.
Hour ratings on the packages of incandescent lamps meant something: concrete testing said there was a really good chance the bulbs in there would last at least that long and from your own experience you knew it was right unless you dropped them or something. Whatever number of hours you see on LED packages are meaningless when it comes to how long those action devices as installed can be expected to last and the manufacturers know it. They just refuse to tell you and our government lets them get away with it because of the liberal loons saying it’s ALL about saving energy. It A LOT about it and most of it comes naturally I believe–just like me I suspect most think LEDs are mainly great. Perhaps if we made them here and paid a bit more for ones that actually passed testing for a reasonable service life and not some “oh–LEDs–those usually yellow things–well they often last about 100,000 hours or so we think maybe if we just keep ’em burnign that long. It’s really that stupid.
Note. I have heard you can now get LED replacement “tubes” for florescent tubes in two varieties: one that works withe the “ballast” still in place; and (the one I like) one that works WITHOUT a ballast (you remove it, one less thing to go belly-up, and no more buzzing and flickering unless it’s from the bulbs, which HAS to be better than florescent tubes).
These days one is doing good if they get 15 years out of a major appliance.
My A/C went out on Sunday late afternoon after working great until it’s stopped putting out cold air. Called in and had a technician out by Monday afternoon.
The system dates from the mid 70’s but the furnace and A/C still works great. I have had friends get new systems and they have had trouble within 5 years of installation. So why put in a new system?
Turned out it was the capacitor on the compressor. Technician fixed that and put a new Polar filter for us and it is working great again.
We bought this place in 2001. Since then we have changed the dishwasher and fridge twice, the water heater once, the cloths dryer once and the washing machine twice.
But the HVAC system just keeps on a keeping on. Annual cleaning and maintenance and it does it’s job. Furnace had to have the venting system changed because during high winds from just the right direction the furnace would go out. A new fan motor and starter and the capacitor are the only problems I’ve had with the A/C.
Going to have to get a new bigger unit soon because of an addition to the house. Thinking about putting the old furnace in my new garage.
My Whirlpool “Duet” washer and dryer will hit their 20th birthday in January. Aside from replacing the bladder on the washer twice over the years, they’ve been troopers.
I am putting in a wood burner just because this leftards don’t like it. As for all the other appliances? Come and take them.
I put a fireplace insert in last year. Nothing like the heat from burning wood to make one feel cozy. The main part of my house was built in 1943 with additions put on in the 50’s. So as typical for homes of that time, the rooms are smallish and I have 8′ ceilings. So the problem is circulating the heat from the insert throughout the house.
Getting ready to have some remodeling done and a 4 season room off the living room and a large garage put on. Adjustments will be made at that time to better circulate the heat from the insert.
Does your insert have a blower? I hooked up a unit with a blower to the cold air return on my furnace, with a damper to shut it off when I wanted to use the furnace. I was able to keep the house at 70° when it was zero outdoors.
Yes it has a variable speed blower. The cold air is drawn in under the fire box and the warmed air blown out through a louvered opening about 2′ long from over the fire box. There is no cold air return near it.
In this house the cold air returns are in the ceilings. I have tried just running the furnace blower to distribute the heat, but it just isn’t efficient enough.
The White House Kitchen (you know the one that serves State Dinners) uses gas ranges and ovens. https://twitter.com/tmitsss/status/1675882937970049024?s=61&t=QlPJhWhJk2nUcknEBpAOoA
Usually great stuff here ate WUWT. Usually that is. There are two sides to all issues and at times companies do seem to respond well to regulatory “gooses” let’s say that result in truly superior appliances such as these we buy today compared to those of yesteryears. The earliest simplest refrigerators have been well surpassed also due to great improvements in the case and refinements to what amount to the same parts. i.e. a good quality “dorm room ‘cube’ refrigerator” of today could end up lasting a century like the “extra” old refrigerator in the basement that has endured a fire–destroying the barn where it had been an “extra” (and outdoor–really not supposed to do that esp. in our climate–refrigerator for some time even by that point.
I detect a whiff of partisan whining perhaps. Just sayin’
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/12/19/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-more-than-100-actions-in-2022-to-strengthen-energy-efficiency-standards-and-save-families-money/
The gas range/cooktop thing however I just say is a bit troubling. What manages to be enacted in that oddly different California (they’re something like France I think–country burns over racism as they still insist that by their law racism hasn’t existed for decades. And the world somehow lets them get by with this while chastising the USA for at least daring to admit that the problem exists. There’s some parallel with the climate change loons there you know…
Where in the US constitution does it declare the executive has the power to regulate what you can buy? The weasels try to use the interstate commerce clause because they don’t care about the constitution.
With that I do agree although that clause has been tortured so far that this [seems] a relative nothing by comparison to things like student loan forgiveness via COVID aid of all things–at least I suppose it’s somewhere there in the legal “basis” for that torture of the constitution.
Perhaps this has something to do with how people forgot (or quit teaching/reminding) that “state” and “country” are really words for the same thing.
I agree with you that good quality appliances at present are superior to good quality appliances of the past — considering however that reliability is still typically quite variable and leads to the occasional “lemon”. It is the initial cost of appliances that is the nub here. Regulators are raising costs of entry for owning appliances and this wallops the middle and lower classes.
The claim that these will save money on utility costs is almost total hogwash. They may or may not because the savings are calculated according to a model, are highly dependent on one’s cost of water/electricity/gas etc., and finally depend on how the consumer uses the appliance. The actual cost of the electical energy commodity is often a small fraction of one’s over-all power bill which varies from place to place. The bill also contains fixed charges, demand charges, taxes, fees and so forth. For the first 500kWhr per month I pay something like 3 cents per kWhr for the commodity itself (we use coal!) and this is the only place cost savings of any appliance — light bulb to dishwasher — can occur. Many consumers are unlikely to see any cost savings, and wouldn’t recognize these savings in the constant chaos of rate-setting by the PUC anyway.
The story link says you must be a subscriber to read past the first paragraph. Why would you link to that?
Joe doesn’t want to ban anything. He doesn’t even know where he is 24/7, or who he is. His handlers feed him lines to spout, wind him up and pull the strings for him to regurgitate his lines.
However, his controllers really do want all of us to give up our appliances which make life a little easier for most of us. They are shooting for total government dependency of the citizens of the US and the world. This “ban” is but one more step in that march towards absolute power.
Think about the clown show that is the cabinet of the Brandon “administration”.
so the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is something like 1 one hundredth of 1 % of the atmosphere (the vast majority is naturaly occurring & not a lot Buyden can do about that) and I wonder what it will be if all these nonsensical rules are implemented – right no change – so if there is no change in the content of the atmosphere how is eliminating it affecting anything
Since CO2 doesn’t drive the climate anyway, eliminating our pittance of “emissions” (which won’t happen anyway -see China, India, other “developing” nations) won’t change a damn thing.
These people have to be stopped and their power removed, soon. Who voted for this insane clown show?
Brandon should lead by example and live in a yurt on the White House lawn.
And eat the grass as a replacement for mowing. And meat.
Oh, Let the “woke” leftists keep pushing. Soon enough the masses will be quoting Popeye (“I’ve had all I can stand–I can’t stands no more”) and the revolution starts. Hope I live long enough to see it.
once again demonstrating that the deep state doesn’t understand energy versus power
And I thought the high efficiency eco friendly dishwasher we bought for my Dads house was just a lemon- now I know the real reason, aye
While I firmly believe that having bureaucrats and elected officials design products, set prices, set targets for inflation, and manipulate labor markets is an exceptionally bad and regressive idea, I also know that some modern products that use less water and electrical energy perform better than their earlier counterparts because I have owned both. The real issue is that they cost a great deal more and this is a burden to people in the middle and lower middle class.
Bureaucrats and politicians are fixated by their idea of “efficiency” while manufacturers and consumers are interested in economy. The two ideas are related but not identical.
I spent many years working on standards development for many products including appliances. That included both Voluntary Consensus Standards (VCS) through ASTM, ANSI, UL, CSA, ISO and others. I also worked on government generated standards from EPA and DOE.
In the VCS process manufacturers participate directly but must have less than 50% of the votes so they can’t control the outcome. The system works very well and produces what I consider the fairest and most technically sound standards. There are thus many tens of thousands of VCSs used routinely in global commerce. In many cases where real data was needed to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of a procedure or test it was the manufacturing members who stepped up and funded the research.
The Federal Government Standards process limits all non-government input to filing comments on proposed rules and requirements. The only data they will typically accept comes from their own contractors. Even when the affected industries sponsor large well designed research projects and present sound results to the agency they are often dismissed as not credible due to the industry funding. It should surprise no one that there is a huge problem with unscrupulous manufacturers falsifying compliance with US government standards. Even the EPA/DOE EnergyStar program failed miserably when the GAO run a covert check on the program.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/files.gao.gov/assets/gao-10-470.pdf
Just look at “efficient” toilets that save the planet by using less water. Unfortunately you often have to flush twice…or maybe a third time. Just saying
Yes, at least they have come a long way on their ability to flush the contents of the bowl. That’s no longer a problem, but the issue is that there isn’t enough water being put into the sewer/septic line to “keep things moving,” as it were, and you end up with a clog in the pipe itself. So one flush after the loaf, one after the paperwork becomes SOP.
When the “reduced water consumption ” toilets were initially mandated in the US, they were awful – people were literally driving to Canada to buy “old school” toilets that actually worked.
GET this disgusting excuse of a president OUT~!