So we start another year and I start checking around for new stats on power consumption and all such things like that..
Its been my opinion that with almost no effort and little added cost, most every appliance could be manufactured to have its electrical consumption reduced by half..
energy is everything....everything. The countries that can do more while consuming less stand a far better chance in the future...and the same down to the per person level...
One thing I have noticed over the years is it only seems to happen with legislation......Manufacturers just have no incentive to otherwise built a better product, only a cheaper one, less efficient one as they dont have to pay for the power it wastes, and dont have to pay for its short life span.
Looks like new legislation came in for fridges, and was easly meet as it always is despite the crying from manufacturers.
Same in the UK this year a whole range of products are to be designed for greater efficiency. I remember 60 watt bulbs...called them ceiling heaters back then, if you have 10 turned on in your home that was 600 watts that kind of power could heat a room now its equivelant in LED is 6.5 watts throwing out a equal amount of light. 10 turned on would be 65 watts..a order of magnitude less. Fridges same thing, now a full size can be found using less than 300kwhrs a year...

We are getting there slowly through legislation, but painfully slowly....one thing that I see that is not getting better is the quallity and life span of products...its getting way worse...I think its time for a import tax, I would say a tax period but since we make little here..a import tax on junky, short life span built equipment. I dont know how it would be assesest against a product, but as with energy consumption a way to quantify it could be found....Now I myself suffer little from junky stuff as I build from scratch, or modify but Crap products are everywhere and one was just brought to me a few days ago by a offgrid friend down the road , his wife bought him(all of them) for chrismas a propane water heater...they had been using a cheap camping type that ran on propane, had its own pump, and temperature setting function, they burn them out maybe every 1,5 years and just buy another...but she desided to buy a expensive, brand name type I think 500 or so on sale. Anyway 3 days later its not working...the display says err -0. So they look in the book that comes with it and the error codes start at 1 through 10... they phone the 800 number for support, and are told that error code means its non field repairable and must be taken into a authorized shop for repair (there is another topic..the authorized repair shop scam 🙄 )
anyway they are way out in the counrty so they pop by my place and ask me to look at it. So we pop it open and find inline to the pump motor is a fuse a sub minature style hidden with shrink wrap in the wiring harness. it had blown, I would call this part, the off warranty revenue generator 🙄 because they could have just used a resetable breaker the end user could reset if this happened, to get to the point while open we looked over this unit and he desided to return it and get the money back...a wise idea I think. They built on demand gas water heaters 100 years ago that worked trouble free for decades!!, and never needed any repair, and we cant even do that today (google water heater rescue)...Something has to change...this crappy product took energy to make, to ship, to distribute, will take energy to dispose of, and now has to be replaced, and that takes more energy...these cheap products cost a LOT!... someone should have to pay and it shouldnt be the end user,

if not a tax maybe a complete import ban on a product design determined to have a mean failure rate of less than 10 years, I dont know but something has to be done...my2 cents