New energy efficiency labels too confusing

I think it may be worse – because according to one poster here on an a related subject – I honestly expected an A grade to also mean it was cheaper to rum – according to his research it isn’t. It may use say less water but still be more expensive to run than a grade B – rather defeating the purpose to ming mind.

I think the great thing about energy labels was the fact that when you were in a shop you could see – at a glance, and without having to think too much about it – which appliance models were generally more energy efficient than others. Simple.

You’d be hard pressed to find a washing machine that’s rated less than a B these days, so some sort of recalibration is needed – but all this seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to update it. To me adding pluses or triple pluses into the mix only serves to make it that little bit more difficult and time-consuming to interpret.

And even worse, the A+, A++ and A+++ ratings won’t be applied across the board – so we’ll have a situation where other items like tumble dryers will still adhere to the A-G scale. Plus there’s likely to be an awkward transitional phase as manufacturers shift to the new labels at different speeds…

I think that I may be the poster that Richard refers to and I’ll repeat, in brief, here my bitter experience of how misleading these ratings are.

I had a 26 year old hot and cold fill washing machine which in 2008 finally became irreparable. I spend around 6 months researching new machines, including Which? test reports but also many other ways to choose. I ended up buying an Energy Saving Trust recommended model which was rated as A++ for energy efficiency, and A+ for washing and spinning performance. which? reported that the model I chose was “poor” at rinsing, however with the impressive ratings and the recommendation from EST, plus the fact that it claimed to use hot water (I have solar panels so this was an important factor for me) and the Which? report that brand reliability was good (they offered a 10 year parts warranty as standard too), I spent £800 on my machine.
From day 1 it was a dead loss: washes that took about 50 minutes in the old machine took well over 2 hours (often almost 3) in the new machine; hot water was NOT drawn in on ANY cycle, despite the manufacturer’s claims, the rinsing was o poor that I had to run at least 2 extra rinses on every single cycle, so water consumption was greater than on the old machine, the load was quoted as 7Kg (my old machine had been 4.5 kg) but the engineer who called the first time it broke down advised me that filling it more than half full was “not advised” and would lead to more breakdowns, the machine was unreliable, breaking down in spectacular style 3 times in the first 21 months of it’s life but worst of all, cycles that had consumed around 1.5 Kw of electricity in the old washer were using almost 4Kw in the new “Efficient” machine.
I argued with the EST and have the e-mail from them in which they admitted that they knew that all new machines would use more power than older models, but their get-out was that they “only rank new machines against each other, not against older models”.
I argued withe manufacturers but they refused to accept that the machine was doing anything other than it was designed to do.
I had to get Trading Standards involve when the first warranty repair was still not carried out after 9 weeks of the machine being totally “dead” and unusable and, when it broke down for the 3rd time in 21 months, I sent it to the scrap man and bought a reconditioned second hand 20+ year old machine instead.
My “new” 20+ year old washer now uses hot water, washes and rinses in a timely and efficient fashion and, like my old faithful, uses well under 1.5Kw of power to run a hot (boil) cycle and much less on cool cycles, so I am saving a fortune in electricity.
Put simply, I just don’t know how on earth the manufacturer’s can get away with the claims of A, A+, A++ and so on when the machines not inly use so much electricity (and water for that matter) but also contribute so much to land fill too! On the first two repairs that the modern machine had the engineer threw into the bin a total of 6 BIG circuit boards and a number of smaller electronic parts, plus huge amounts of plastic casings and fittings and utterly abhorrent amounts of bubble and shrink wrap in which the new parts had come. That’s before you look at the environmental cost of importing the damned things from Korea in the first place and the environmental impact of the scrappage of the machine less than 2 years old.
I think there is an overwhelming case for Which? to lobby long and hard for Energy ratings to be expressed in terms of actual amount of energy used (not a comparison or ranking against other machines) and to also factor in the likely environmental impact of scrappage of parts / the whole thing when things go wrong. The negative impact of the scrappage part can be factored up for unreliable brans and down for reliable ones. The rating should also reflect how much of the machine is made of metal and other materials (glass for example) which can be fully and easily recycled and how much of it is made from plastics and other less easily recycled or non recyclable parts. Finally the score should factor in the environmental impact of import so that machines made in the UK, or in nearby parts of the world have a better rating than those which come from the opposite side of the globe.
Sorry – I said I’d make this brief and it’s a flippin’ essay!!!!