We’ve all become familiar with those colour-coded stickers on the side of fridges, dishwashers and the like telling us how energy-efficient our new appliance is or is not.
Buy at the A-rated Green end of the spectrum, and you can look forward to lower power bills and bask in the warm, virtuous glow of doing your bit for the environment. Pick a ‘G’ and its livid red sticker and you’ll pay through the nose and might as well start wearing a t-shirt with ‘global warming – who cares?’ written on the front.
Of course, in reality it is far from as straightforward as that. Technical improvements have already led to inflation in the rating system, leaving some A-rated gadgets so palpably superior to their fellow top-performers that they now merit ‘AAA’ status, leaving the old single ‘A’ looking a little suspect if you really want to be green. Most
We mention this because the government this week announced that homes will be subjected to a similar type of rating system as part of the new Seller-Packs to be introduced next year.
Just as it is questionable how often the A-G rating tips the balance one way or the other in Currys’ showrooms, it would be easy to dismiss this initiative as a token gesture and another example of officialdom’s desire to rank and rate everything under the sun.
In fact it is another indicator of which way the wind is blowing. The homes we live in and our places of work and entertainment will inevitably come under the same regulatory scrutiny as our cars and, indeed, our washing machines.
And in a period of rampant energy price inflation, it is certain that the savings available on consumption will become less marginal and more critical to businesses and householders alike. For engineers and technologists, this represents a host of major new opportunities.
Andrew Lee
Editor
The Engineer & The Engineer Online
PS. There is still time to reserve a place at The Engineer Summit to be held at
George Orwell only got the date wrong.
British homes in comparison to their Northern European counterparts are not very well insulated. Finland has much better insulated homes with treble/quadruple glazed windows; double, insulated doors etc with much better insulated walls, floors and roofs. It is something we should be striving for. The extracted air warms the incoming air, the outgoing waste water warms the incoming water etc. We need higher standards.
It never ceases to amaze me how few people either know about or care about energy saving – it hits you in the pocket as well as the conscience. So the more A to G stickers that appear on things the better in my view and I was delighted to see the house efficiency item on the news.
The only downside of the AA rated washing machine that we have just bought is that it uses so little water it doesn’t actually get the clothes as clean as our old hideously inefficient machine used to! Net effect is that we use more washing powder – how eco-friendly/energy efficient is that?
A retired EE’s comments on his home electric power meter spin rate:
What with my recent new energy efficient heat pump installation and our Baltimore, Maryland USA impending 75% increase in electric rates (from 9 cents per KWH to 15 cents per KWH), I decided to do an electric power draw audit. The meter spin rate versus main breakers on or off quickly proved that it indeed stopped spinning with the main breakers off. However, ideally the homeowner could benefit from a real time power draw spread sheet graphic showing energy consumption by appliance type. Are his super energy efficient appliances really operating super efficiently or do they need service? When should he upgrade to a new more efficient appliance? So, yes, there’s much to be done to instrument a real time energy auditing capability for modern households. I wholly expect a future requirement that every appliance be given an Internet address for direct reporting of it’s energy usage through a home data network. In the mean time, an energy measuring box with ethernet interface is probably readily available by searching Google. That will give me a better idea of the average and peak energy usage of my appliances. Off peak electric rates may be worth pursuing eventually, but everybody needs air conditioning at the same time on a hot day in August here in Baltimore.