Let me tell you a story....It is a good story. We need good stories these days, and it is actually appliance related. In the 1980s, California decided(to their credit) that energy standards needed to be stricter, much stricter on refrigerators.
Industries have always been reluctant to change based on regulation. From their perspective, it is a ton of investment for no plausible advantage. In this case, manufacturers had no choice if they wanted to sell refrigerators in California. To their credit, they did not lobby or squawk about the net increase to the consumer.
The net effect of this legislation is you as the consumer pay 10% more for refrigeration. However, you save almost 2/3 in energy consumption over the products manufactured in the 1980s...or about $120-180 per year.
Like I posted one month ago, this product is cheaper than your 10 year old refrigerator to operate...Now for the good news, the man responsible for the legislation, Steven Chu, is your incoming Energy Secretary.
Read about Mr. Chu and his challenges here.
Steve, I thought of an idea for a blog post. This weekend the lights in Eastie were flickering with the stong winds. Do you guys have residential solutions for backup/emergency lights? I checked out the options at the box store but they all looked very commercial. So far the best I could find was an screw in mechanism that you add to your lamp which kicks on for 90 minutes in a power outage. Just a thought...
ReplyDeleteGood question...almost too good for my limited expertise...There is a company called EAB that manufactures safety and security lights
ReplyDeleteI will look them up