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This will create an industry for people who trick up dishwashers to
use enough water to get the dishes clean.
Or it could end up with dishwashers that can actually clean dishes with that
little water. Or have people lost their faith in modern technology? Is it
so impossible to believe such dishwashers can be created? Cars used to get
11 MPG and now they get incredible higher mileage out of the same single
gallon of gasoline. Why? Because the Feds pushed the industry to do so.
The free market resisted every step of the way. It falls completely flat
when it comes to doing things that make things better for everyone. Case in
point: Set top cable boxes. The industry didn't care about making them
green because someone else paid for the electricity to run them. New rules
will make them care and they'll howl, too. For a while, anyway and the US
may save enough electricity in the aggregate to retire more than one
coal-fired plant.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...617-story.html
The 224 million cable boxes across the nation together consume as much
electricity as produced by four giant nuclear reactors, running around the
clock. . . ."It is a classic case of market failure," said Andrew
McAllister, a member of the California Energy Commission. "The consumers
have zero information and zero control over the devices they get."
It's actually a fascinating study in free market failures because people
often have no choice (or even information) about how they could save money.
Similarly, tenants in millions of apartments pay for electricity, but
landlords decide whether they get efficient appliances, modern air
conditioning systems and good building insulation.
Remember how the auto industry screamed about how pollution controls were
going to bankrupt the industry and make cars unaffordable? That never
happened, but the air did get cleaner as the Feds mandated higher MPG and
lower emissions.
Eventually, after all the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the auto industry
(especially the foreign makers like Honda) finally started building cleaner
cars that resulted in healthier outcomes and cleaner air for everyone.
The MPG standards have played a very significant role in reducing our
dependence on oil sources controlled by religious fanatics, and that's a
very good thing.
The water restrictions come at in important time when many of the country's
(actually the world's) aquifiers are being drained to previously unheard of
levels.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...9-groundwater-
california-drought-aquifers-hidden-crisis/
Areas where wells used to find water at 300 now require drilling to two or
three times that depth. We're in the midst of a serious *world* water
crisis. Clean water is a precious resource that's becoming more precious
every day. Why waste it if technology can provide a better solution?
If you believe some sci fi writers from when I was kid, we would at least
have sonic dishwashers that used NO water or self-cleaning dishes.
Despite all the groaning about the alleged horrors of low-volume toilets,
they have become the norm. With modern low-volume toilets, the worst that
*usually* happens is you may occasionally have to flush twice. I like
seeing both my water bill and my electric bill shrink. I bought a whole
bunch of LED bulbs and expect it to shrink further. Almost all my 23W
nVision CFLs now take too long to warm up to be useful in most cases.
I wonder if we will ever see truly "cold light" that emits all energy in the
visible spectrum. We're slowly getting there, it seems.
The problem I have is that the price point sweet spot seems to be for 60W
equivalent LEDs and they are just too dim for these old eyes. I got a bunch
of socket splitters and they've allowed me to double up in some fixtures but
fixtures that were designed to use two LEDs would be better - it would give
an equivalence of slight over 100W still for less than a 100W equivalent
CFL. But even if the cost were the same, I'd opt for the no-mercury LED
every time. CFLs will eventually be phased out.
--
Bobby G.