More efficient appliances mean less water going through the sewer, and less wastewater that needs to be treated. Which means lower capital expenditures, which eventually come directly out of your pocket.
And if even a fraction of people feel the need to pre-rinse or post-rinse, those gains can disappear.
Also, we've apparently transitioned from waste water being something that had to be dealt with to an actual asset. It can be cleaned to partial usage (and used for agriculture) or directed to help refill specific aquifers.
IOW, wastewater infrastructure is necessary above a certain density.
The irony is that wastewater infrastructure is one of the areas where cities often defer maintenance, leading to sewage backups when it rains.
You can always add clothes. If it’s too hot, there’s only so much you can remove. Particularly in a corporate setting
This is a huge argument in favor of WFH: fewer/no arguments over office temps, a debate about as old as time itself, and particularly a place where it's going to be extremely difficult to get varied groups of folks to all be comfortable and agree (imagine someone super petite vs someone with a good bit of body mass, or someone who grew up in Norway vs someone from Singapore, or even just guys and gals who statistically tend to have different circulation, fat levels, etc. leading to different preferences in ambient temperature).
One exec guy would turn the AC on high because there was little circulation over there. He liked it 'cool'. I was on the other side of the open area, in a small office. I'd come in in July, and the thermometer on my digital desk clock said 63f. I could not move my fingers to type efficiently because it was so cold. My fingers ached. I brought in a space heater and was chastised that I was "making a big deal out of nothing". 100+ people were consistently uncomfortable to make sure one person was comfortable. The energy waste had to have been enormous.
The days this guy was in it reminded me of working in foodservice, having to stock the walk-in cooler on delivery days. Yes, by afternoon, it was bearable, but 63f was just too cold to work effectively. Dozens of us were impacted, but the one top exec needed his comfort the 3 days a week he was in.
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> The days this guy was in it reminded me of working in foodservice, having to stock the walk-in cooler on delivery days.
63F is not a walk-in cooler; 40F is a walk-in cooler.
Hyperbole like this is just rubbish.
Outdoors we at least have airflow to wick heat away. Indoors, it's just stale, warm air (there's other trains of thought that discuss the impact of CO2 in rooms on deep thought; I don't have any such studies handy to link at the moment but it does come to mind tangentially).
Our bodies generate a pocket of heat that we end up sitting in without airflow. Years ago I bough an air circulator (a fan designed to push a lot of air slowly across a room, instead of blowing on a person) specifically to deal with this, and it brought my room-temperature-upper-tolerance from ~76 to ~80 without any need for AC.
They should get used to it. Cooling large spaces is a huge waste of electricity, and it's not like 74 degrees is anywhere near hot or miserable.
That's always a good concern to have. That's why regulations that restrict consumption for individual appliances or activities are pretty silly.
An overall carbon price (and appropriate water price) would be much more rational than individually banning drinking straws and thirsty dishwashers.
But that's politics for you.
People who point to electronic energy usage need to leave my clock cycles alone, and either direct their anger towards the world's elite, with their private planes and yachts, or just shut up completely.
And Microsoft can suck my nuts with their default settings for power savings. Why would I buy a sports car and let someone keep a software governor on the engine?
The majority of the energy used in dishwasher is from heating up the water. If you wash with cold water, you are using less energy than the dish washer.
Edit: I just measured my kitchen sink and pot for this, 17x19 and 4 inches high = 5.6 gallons. If I go all the way to the sink's overflow at 6.5 inches high, that's 9 gallons.
You'd better rinse with hot water to get the soap away.
Because I can only use water cool enough to put my hands in, the dishes are not as clean as what a dishwasher can do, but, again, no way does a single wash consume 5+ gallons.
Rinsing dishes requires fresh water from the tap, which runs somewhere from 1-2 gallons per minute. After filling a sink (or bucket) with water and rinsing everything, it's easy to use 5+ gal to wash dishes.
I'd be curious how the study was conducted, and if they have video of the study participants washing their dishes.
The one that pains me is ovens. They are hugely power hungry and here many models have a very tiny amount of insulation (unless you get a "pyrolitic" model that heats up to 500C to burn the oil off, they have better insulation by requirement of that).
We have no energy rating for ovens, so no real incentive to improve. The vast majority are also installed by builders when the house is built, so consumers never even make a choice in the first place. You can also imagine that also pushes most builders to the bottom end of the market. I'm also still always surprised how expensive ovens can be for how simple they are.
Most of them now also have a fan to run air around the the outside of the unit so it doesn't overheat the cupboard around it (but not all) which is perhaps also a hint at the poor insulation. The cheap builder model I most recently pulled apart had such poor insulation and gaps all around it.
Choice's most recent review has running cost per year ranging from $310 to $651 (this is unfortunately behind a paywall): https://www.choice.com.au/home-and-living/kitchen/ovens/revi...
"The running costs are calculated based on running the oven at 170°C for one hour, three times per week for 10 years at 30c per kWh. Where available, the fan-forced function is used, otherwise, the fan-assist is used. For models without either function, the top and bottom elements (convection or traditional bake) are used."
That's also probably generous since you often run a higher temp and I suspect 200-220C might make a big difference in that cost.
It's a good reason to make use of appliances like air fryers (which despite the name are mostly just ovens), they heat a much smaller space and use a lot less power as a result.
Unfortunately the ever shrinking house makes storing and using such things increasingly difficult. Microwaves are also only 50% effeceient (a surprise I recently learnt).
I know why we don't have it, and energy ratings are partly a proxy for it, but I always wished the average consumer had easy ways to be more informed about trade-offs exactly like this article talks about. You can trade energy effeciency for a slower cycle - that's partly why most washers these days have many different cycle options - you're trading one thing for another - but most of the time they just tell you the name of the situation they are supposedly for without even a hint at maybe how much more or less energy or water or delicacy you are trading off. The same reason product reviews are never clear cut because everyone has different priorities :)
[0] At least here, a 208V element is not available. It works at 208V but not as well.
If energy prices reflect externalities, you wouldn't need any special regulations or official ratings to give people incentives to get improved appliances.
Energy costs are already giving people incentives to do so, but perhaps they aren't high enough?
There is no way to know how much the oven is using. Even noce purchased, most people have no idea how much energy in their home is used by what (they just get a single bill and for an entire 2 months period).
Lastly as noted, at least here, the majority are installed by builders and included in a package price - the consumer doesn't choose and most builders don't offer an option. Many more would also be chosen by landlords for those who rent, rather than home owners. Or may have been chosen by the home owner that built the house you then purchased.
Thus I would say the number of consumers that directly choose and purchase the oven they use would be a low percentage, and the cost to replace it is high enough to make that unlikely and not have a great payback period.
Eg in Germany people routinely check out how good the insulation on eg the windows is when they choose a place to buy or rent. That's because energy is expensive in Germany, and it gets cold enough in winter that you need to heat.
If energy is cheap enough, people can be rationally (!) ignorant about these issues.
If the same ovens are available in the UK, then maybe look for the model number on a UK website.