"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
Better to encourage people to heat less water - don't boil a full kettle
if your teapot only holds half a kettle-full. Or else encourage people
to use the remaining hot water as part of the washing-up water.

You can encourage people to do anything, and they can choose to ignore
you. Requiring a new device to have a certain level of efficiency removes
them being able to ignore that.

True, but it also encourages people to hang onto a less efficient appliance
which may use more energy but also has more of the end result that people
buy it for.

For example if an older 1000W vac has better suction that a modern 500W
(even though the modern one has better "suck per watt" performance) would
you get rid of the old one or would you strive to keep it running because it
does the job better, even though it costs more to run?

Likewise for light bulbs: tungsten ones tend to be smaller than LED or CFL
ones of comparable brightness, and tend to have wider field of coverage (for
GU10 spots) and reach full brightness much quicker than some CFLs. We have a
light fitting in the kitchen which has 5 GU10 sockets. With tungstens, that
lit the work surfaces much better than with LED replacements, so we might
have to replace the fitting with one that takes seven, eight or nine bulbs
to get the same brightness and fewer pools of darkness between one bulb and
the next.