Domestic Appliances Guzzle Far More Energy Than Advertised, Says EU Survey (theguardian.com) 205
Chrisq writes: An EU study has found that many electronic devices and appliances use more energy in real-world conditions than in the standard EU tests. Often the real world figures are double those in the ratings. Sometimes this is achieved by having various optional features switched off during the test. For example, switching on modern TV features such as "ultra-high definition" and "high-dynamic range" in real-world test cycles boosted energy use in four out of seven televisions surveyed -- one by more than 100%. However some appliances appear to have "defeat devices" built in, with some Samsung TVs appearing to recognize the standard testing clip: "The Swedish Energy Agency's Testlab has come across televisions that clearly recognize the standard film (IEC) used for testing," says the letter, which the Guardian has seen. "These displays immediately lower their energy use by adjusting the brightness of the display when the standard film is being run. This is a way of avoiding the market surveillance authorities and should be addressed by the commission."
the VW syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
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Will be interesting to see what happens here - Samsung being Korean, the EU might have a harder time laying down the law than with VW.
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When someone is not paying fines, confiscating assets is always an option. But the real punishment would be being banned from the market.
Of course, Samsung would pay.
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Re:the VW syndrome (Score:4, Insightful)
I laughed at your 'Czechoslovakia' notion, but I straight out snorted at Samsung being able to afford something one of the most powerful governments in the world cannot. And I'm not talking about the 'political' aspect of EU, which is, granted, kind of slow and impotent, but the most vigorous and agile one - the regulatory.
What is it with people on this site over and over again underestimating the power of EU? EU regulatory bodies can and actually do enforce their respective regulations all the time.
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What is it with people on this site over and over again underestimating the power of EU?
That powerful EU is still waiting for Microsoft to pay them 300 million euro from 10 years ago...
Re: the VW syndrome (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting how so many anonymous cowards are popping up to defend Volkswagen and say it's the evil US that's actually at fault and anyway everybody cheats on emissions, why single out VW just because they cheat more.
No, the US does not "lay down the law" for the EU.
The EU is not one country. It has many different countries, with many different regulations, which are different from the U.S. standards. Overall, however, Volkswagen recalled 8.5 million cars in the EU for cheating on the emissions tests, while they recalled only 0.5 million in the US, so, yes, they cheated in EU as well as in the US.
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The EU is not one country. It has many different countries, with many different regulations, which are different from the U.S. standards.
Not so much on consumer products, product standardization to encourage trade has been part of the EU almost since the beginning and free flow of goods is one of the "four freedoms" of EUs inner market. With a few exceptions like drugs, weapons, animals and animal products for disease control etc. you can buy almost anything from any EU country. A car or TV is effectively approved for the whole of EU at once or not at all.
This has lead to some gnashing of teeth as occasionally countries have had a stricter s
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And sometimes just the absurd like the rules of how much a cucumber bends that was later lifted.
I'm glad you mentioned this because it just goes to show how much you get your idea of the "truth" from the Daily Mail and other conspiracy nuts.
So lets look at it:
a) There's no rules on cucumber bends. Cucumbers aren't bent. You meant bananas. But even when we look at bananas:
b) There was never a rule on how bent a banana is allowed to be in the EU, there was only a set of classifications for bananas. Part of the classification included it bend radius. No one ever banned any banana due to the classificatio
Re: the VW syndrome (Score:2)
Volkswagen at the time was purportedly about to become the highest revenue automaker worldwide. They were about to become 'the than GM.' I remember articles talking about that. Since these practices have been revealed in other industries now, and enen other automakers, you wonder if the way it got hyped up might have been a little 'patriotism' on the part of the media.
But somebody else broke the law too, why arrest me (Score:5, Insightful)
They made it look as though this was the first ever violation of any kind by a car manufacturer and somehow more evil than anything else that had ever happened, even though it quickly became clear how widespread similar tricks are.
So, they cheated, they lied about how they cheated, and they became the world's largest car manufacturer as a direct result of the fact that they cheated, but the anonymous cowards are popping up on slashdot saying it's all political.
"Everybody cheats, why single out VW merely because they did it on a larger scale and deliberately" is not an excuse.
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"Selective enforcement protects General Motors' market position."
What could be wrong about that?
Your 'direct result' assertion is unadulterated bullshit. Insert quarter to try again.
They cheated. (Score:3)
Your 'direct result' assertion is unadulterated bullshit. Insert quarter to try again.
Classic diesels got better gas mileage but had worse emissions. Volkswagen made the claim that they had solved that problem: they could make diesels get the better gas mileage and also get low emissions... and also sell at a reasonable price!
They were partly right. When they geared up to break into the US market with their diesel passenger cars, there actually was a pretty good low-emissions diesel technology... but Mercedes owned it. Their original plan was to license the Mercedes technology, but the c
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If you look at bulk sum emissions you may be right. But the emissions from diesel are chemically different and in some regards more benign. Soot is a bad thing to breathe but these days everybody is worked up over CO2.
Well, to some extent. But the cheating was primarily about nitrogen oxides ("NOx"), not CO2, which is a completely different issue.
And I absolutely challenge your statement that diesel emissions are "in some regards more benign." As Wikipedia puts it: "citation needed".
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They made it look as though this was the first ever violation of any kind by a car manufacturer and somehow more evil than anything else that had ever happened, even though it quickly became clear how widespread similar tricks are.
So, they cheated, they lied about how they cheated, and they became the world's largest car manufacturer as a direct result of the fact that they cheated, but the anonymous cowards are popping up on slashdot saying it's all political.
"Everybody cheats, why single out VW merely because they did it on a larger scale and deliberately" is not an excuse.
VW's problem is two fold.
1. They got caught.
2. The way they cheated.
Everyone, including the regulatory agencies know you'll never get laboratory figures out in the real world. If I want to know the MPG of the 2er I'm getting, I'll ask people who already have said 2er (online forums for everything means this has usually already been asked and answered). However the state of tune of the engine in the laboratory must be the same as the state of tune of the engine on the road. VW cheated by changing the
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They didn't do it on a larger scale, aside from being plain bigger.
Wrong. They did it on a massive scale.
We found many car manufacturers whose cars were tuned in some specific way to beat the regulatory tests, and performed horribly in any real-world scenario--typically on-par with the VW offerings.
You missed the point. VW did their cheating not by merely choosing settings that performed well on the test but not as well in the real world. VW actually cheated: they detected the test, and turned off their emissions controls.
Yes, other companies also had poorer performance in the real world. Check for example, the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
"the diesel cars [from other manufactures] passed the EU’s official lab-based regulatory tes
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The question should be, in the absence of cheating, would the tests reasonably reflect real-world usage?
If the answer is no, then the tests need to be updated to better reflect real-world usage.
If the answer is yes, then there is no problem with the tests themselves, and it's the cheating that needs to be addressed.
You could attempt to address cheating with more comprehensive testing, but it would likely have to be a *lot* more comprehensive, since anything less than "the entirety of normal usage" is a subs
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If the answer is no, then the tests need to be updated to better reflect real-world usage.
I'm having an awful damned hard time getting this through peoples's heads.
Re:the VW syndrome (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have an LG TV, and I have gotten pretty prominent notifications that changing setting X will significantly affect power consumption. So I have no idea if LG is gaming the system, but they seem pretty upfront about what affects energy use, and make it pretty apparent to the operator.
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After the VW thing that really should be obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
People game standardized tests. Graphics cards, benchmarks, cars, students, teachers, if you have a standardized test, people will put in the effort to game the numbers.
Maybe they should do what they do for TV : recruit a random sample of people, stick an energy monitor on their appliances, and see what happens.
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Re:After the VW thing that really should be obviou (Score:5, Interesting)
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The only solution is strong consumer laws. In the UK products must last a "reasonable length of time", which in practice means if things like white goods that you would expect to last you a decade fail after three years you can get at least half your money back. The exact amount can ultimately be determined by a court, but generally if it lasts half as long as you would reasonably expect you get half your money back or a warranty repair.
This creates a great incentive for shops to sell good brands that last,
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That's two different things you and the GP are talking about. The GP is talking about life on the shelf. You're talking about life in your home. The latter hasn't been a complaint in this story so far.
Actually the aspects of both of your comments are intertwined, you can actually repair appliances for quite a long time after they cease manufacturing because many of the changes that come out in the new model are purely cosmetic.
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One of the main problems is features based on models rather than features as an optional addon or software upgrade. I mean DLC sucks in games, but producing 2 different TVs with two different model numbers based on some software features, or the inclusion of a SCART port instead of something else, just doesn't make sense. I think you'll find the number of "different" model of any whitegood on the market is actually quite small with only cosmetic / minor tweak changes underneath that none the less get a comp
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--
So you spent more on the one that is apparently gaming standardized tests...? I'll just point out that the work to game the test isn't free, either.
Re:After the VW thing that really should be obviou (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:After the VW thing that really should be obviou (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not likely. Smart meters are one of those things forced upon consumers by power companies whenever they get an alternative power source like solar panels installed.
In California, they tried to force them on everyone, period. But they are shit. When they fail they fail in favor of the power company, or they let smoke and fire out. Meters that have been working for literally 30 or 40 years get replaced with "smart" meters that fail in 30 or 40 days. Not every time, of course, but way more than is acceptable. PG&E even gave a third party contractor the gate code so that they could come install a smart meter after we had formally opted out. PG&E is literally evil
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Or you could, you know, switch to LED bulbs and pay $30/year for all your lights left on 24/7...
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After the shitstorm VW got, it should've been obvious to other companies that this sort of BS really doesn't pay in the long run. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
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Not true. And VW did not have "some of the lowest real-world NOx emissions."
It is true that, after the VW scandal, investigations revealed that six other car manufacturers used strategies in optimizing their emission controls to lower emission in testing but not in real world conditions. But VW did not merely optimize their controls for test conditions-- they actually had software to detect the fact that testing was going on and tur
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Just dishonest companies. The difference between the EU and the US, the EU has rules against this.You want to game the system in Europe? Sure, go ahead. It's a self-certification. You can game it all you want, you probably will get products through, no problem. But wait until you get caught because someone reported you and questioned your documentation, then your top level employees can't even get into Europe because they'll all have an arrest warrant for them. Then you can kiss all your prospects in the EU
Phht (Score:3)
Next they're going to tell us that automakers somehow game the emissions tests. Yeah, like THAT'S possible.
FLASHBACK 1993: Hercules and The quick brown fox (Score:5, Interesting)
My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?" It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 [google.com] and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.
I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.
Has anyone done an energy study to estimate how much energy is consumed by EU "market surveillance authorities" and even the EU apparatus itself? Perhaps if we recognize the EU as a special case and stub the whole thing out with a rubber stamp, people will be able to watch HD television and toast four slices of bread at once and with former EU personnel in the workplace everyone will be able to work one less day a week with same pay.
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The article is indeed worth a read. I couldn't imagine a maker of hardware saying today "Yeah, I wrote that cheating routine myself, that way we come out on top every time a comparison is run, pretty clever, eh?"
They may THINK that, but I doubt they'd have the chutzpah to just throw that in your face.
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It wasn't so clear cut back then. People wanted to play Quake with the best possible frame rate, so the driver would detect quake.exe and apply some application specific optimizations. That was happening well into the 2000s at least, and was advertised as a feature by AMD and Nvidia.
All that has really changed now is that instead of the driver doing the tweaks, the game developers build them into their code. Somehow it's not cheating if the developer tweaks the pixel shaders when the game detects an Nvidia
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The Nvidia driver actually DOES that same thing you describe. Check the patch notes for the GeForce drivers, they quite specifically talk about optimizing for a bunch of specific games every time.
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This is pretty much what graphics drivers do today, too. To optimize for a game when they detect it as the foreground application. And I highly doubt that anyone considers this a bad or even illegal practice. That's also pretty much what I WANT the driver to do, to get out of the hardware that I have the maximum for the game I play.
The complaint here is that this was done to artificial tests that had zero benefit for actual, real-life, applications but was used to mislead people into thinking it had.
Re:FLASHBACK 1993: Hercules and The quick brown fo (Score:5, Insightful)
toast four slices of bread at once
*sigh* These Euro-Myths never die, do they? No matter how often they are debunked, they just keep coming back.
Here is the source of the claim, it's literally one sentence on page 56: http://www.ecodesign-wp3.eu/si... [ecodesign-wp3.eu]
A bunch of liars, sorry "journalists", claimed that this meant the EU was going to ban two slot toasters. Such a plan never existed.
Later a new variation on the claim referred to 4 slot toasters because the EU was considering minimum efficiency standards for heating and cold storage kitchen appliances. Of course, there was never a ban - you can make a 40 slot toaster if you want, it just has to use reasonably efficient heating elements and mechanical design.
watch HD television
We have had HD television broadcast over the air for more than a decade in Europe, and you can't buy new SD televisions any more.
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*sigh* These Euro-Myths never die, do they?
A bit further up was a post complaining about bendy cucumbers being banned. Disregarding the fact that cucumbers are normally straight, people can't even get the myths right anymore.
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That's a new one to me. Food seems to be a favourite topic of these myths.
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Disregarding the fact that cucumbers are normally straight, people can't even get the myths right anymore.
Surely you mean "can't even get the myths straight anymore".
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There are, in fact, bendy cucumbers and usually they aren't sold in the markets because they make packaging difficult and are less desirable by the consumers, but it is not like they are forbidden, some markets specifically sell these so less cucumbers are "wasted".
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Later a new variation on the claim referred to 4 slot toasters because the EU was considering minimum efficiency standards for heating and cold storage kitchen appliances. Of course, there was never a ban - you can make a 40 slot toaster if you want, it just has to use reasonably efficient heating elements and mechanical design.
The problem in Europe is not the toasters, but the toasting products. Because sliced bread is now made very tall, toasters have become taller to accommodate it. However other toasted products like (English) muffins or crumpets remain the same size or slightly smaller than they used to be. This means getting my crumpet out of a toaster involves angling it and using the cancel button to eject my crumpet at speed whilst calculating the parabolic arc to ensure that it lands on the plate on the breakfast bar and
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There is usually a rack on the top for crumpets and the like. Your aren't supposed to put them in the slots. I'm not an expert though, and I didn't RTFM.
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But this is amazing! I had no knowledge of the EU myth, sole inspiration was my own four slice toaster (manufactured ~1993, Chicago) that has a switch.
Most four slice toasters have two levers, each of which causes two slices of toast to sink into the machine and be toasted separately, as they are actually a pair of two-slice toasters in one case. This has long been true.
Two slot toaster (Score:2)
Standardized tests will invariable result in this (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have standardized tests, people will do what's necessary to perform well on those standardized tests and ignore anything else. What happened when schools got them? Every teacher began teaching to the test, i.e. what will be asked at this test, everything else was simply swept under the rug. Why? Because it won't be tested, so it's superfluous. Actually harmful, because it will take up valuable time and brain capacity for no gain.
No gain at the test, that is.
Same here. Your test will perform X, so we'll do good at X. And on nothing else.
There's also that problem that customers want cheap TVs that have great features, and that is pretty much the exact opposite of power conservation. You cannot build cheap TVs that have all sorts of features, great resolution, high contrast, fast switching and so on, and don't consume much power.
Now take a wild guess which of the three things "cheap", "performance" and "compliance" gets thrown out the window? Hint: You can't fire cheap, because that's what both the maker and the customer wants. You can't cut performance, because the user would eventually notice and a huge stink ensues on various test sites on the internet. And compliance is something that gets tested once and nobody really gives a fuck about it.
So pick the one that you could do without.
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If you don't have a test X, then we don't know if you will do good at anything.
The only people that gripe about tests are the ones that haven't learned anything and don't want to get caught.
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Testing is necessary, but don't test subset A and tell everyone up front that you'll test subset A. Same as in school, what did you learn when your teacher told you that you're going to get tested about the stuff on pages 80-110? You learned the stuff on pages 80-110. If it was on page 79 or 111, it didn't even cross your mind to learn any of that. Because it would literally be useless knowledge.
Should you have learned it? Yes, of course. Because pages 60-80 explained just what 80-110 required you to know t
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Yes, at least you learned it. The problem with not testing is you don't know if they learned pages 80-111, or learned anything at all.
"We have to make sure that tests cover the whole spectrum of what's required"
So you want testing, or you don't want testing? People complain about Common Core testing all the time in schools and "teaching to the test". But they never offer any alternatives other than "make sure everyone learns everything"
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The way I see it, standardization of testing is both necessary and self-defeating. Ideally, we want to ensure that people become useful adults with some ability to contribute to society. We believe that having a well rounded education promotes this goal. We want to make sure we are getting value from the resources we expend into this effort.
In order to ensure we are getting value, we need some way to measure the results of education. The measurement has to be applied equally across the board, or else thing
Problem here is actually the test (Score:2)
In addition to helping people buy computers, I also help people buy TVs. A lot of them complain that the TV doesn't seem as bright as it seemed at the store, and will "randomly" suddenly turn very dark or off. That's my cue to visit their home, go through the TV's settings menu, and shut off all the power-saving features like the auto-dim timer and dynamic brightness.
Re:Standardized tests will invariable result in th (Score:5, Interesting)
Your test will perform X, so we'll do good at X. And on nothing else.
So you just need to make your test comprehensive. If the car emissions test had involved fitting measurement devices to real consumer's cars at random, the cheating would have failed.
The EU vacuum cleaner tests are a good example. They test on multiple surfaces with a very good approximation of house dust, so the cleaning ability, energy consumption and emissions are all measured accurately. The main criticism is that they only measure with empty dust bags/bins, but the next version of the test is going to fix that.
You cannot build cheap TVs that have all sorts of features, great resolution, high contrast, fast switching and so on, and don't consume much power.
History demonstrates that to be untrue. TVs have been steadily getting more and more efficient over the years. CRTs became LCDs, CCFL backlights became LED, the image processing chip lithography got smaller and more power efficient, even as the amount of work increased. Standby power decreased by orders of magnitude too, and there were even savings from including set top box functionality into smart TVs. Most of them use ARM processors, which have got much more efficient mainly thanks to phones and tablets.
All the while the image quality has been getting better too. Contrast improved a lot when the change from CCFL to LED was made, for example.
The purpose of these regulations is to make sure manufacturers don't do what happened with vacuum cleaners. Bigger, more powerful motors because consumers equate big motors with better cleaning. In fact most of them just produced more heat, while cleaning much worse than Japanese models that used 1/4th the power, because in Japan consumers were prioritizing good cleaning and low power consumption. So now the EU puts a star rating on vacuum cleaners to show how well they clean, while limiting the motor size so that the manufacturers actually have to innovate instead of just applying more and more suction until it rips your carpet up.
This is why we have brush bars now. Available for decades in Japan, but not in the EU because consumers only cared about MOAR WATTS.
Have you ever met anyone... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...who really uses the "green" program on washing machines or dishwashers? If the artifact mostly soaks in lukewarm water for 4 hours and comes out still dirty and with remains of detergent, it has to be washed again. No energy was saved. One can always set goals, but even bureaucrats cannot bend the rules of physics just by creating arbitrary standards.
I have to say that varies from appliance to appliance. In my dishwasher the eco wash is fine if you don't have cooking pots with baked on food. In my washing machine it's like you say, though if the clothes weren't too dirty you can get away with adding another rinse and spin rather than repeating the whole process.
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Get a Toto. Even their 1-gallon super-eco model is an outperformer, although the slightly-larger models have more flushing power.
Toilets are engineered with complex fluid dynamics to get flow and pressure just right, and to make the flush swirl properly. This means a 3-gallon tank might flush just about anything, but a 1-gallon tank in a well-designed bowl can flush what a 1.5-gallon tank in a naive design can't. Even if the 3-gallon tank does flush, the flow and swirl characteristics will determine ho
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In my experience, round-bowl toilets work much better and take up less room than the elongated bowl toilets. I have never understood the appeal of the elongated bowls.
20 years ago when low-flow toilets were new, Toto was leaps and bound better than anything else. The difference in performance is not so great anymore, but Toto is still relatively expensive.
There are no $50 Kohler toilets at Home Depot.
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Elongated bowls don't bang male-parts when you scoot forward a bit. They're seen as a luxury option for this purpose, but only by men, and not necessarily by all men. It's also easier to pee standing up.
Good point on the round toilet fluid dynamics.
The limits of our fluid dynamics technology (and fluid dynamics in general--there's only so much energy in a gallon of water that's not elevated 6 feet above the bowl) remain close to 20 years ago; the general understanding of and ability to manufacture to
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I have never understood the appeal of the elongated bowls.
You must be a female. Women typically don't understand the appeal of elongated bowls.
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The lukewarm 4 hour soak is also known as the "delicates mode", i.e. the one you use if you don't care about how long it takes but do want your clothes to last and not bobble up all the time.
This is why the EU gets involved. Consumers don't understand the issues, they just think that more = better. More power, more speed, bigger, louder, brighter is always better, right? And consumer magazines fail to dispel that myth because proper testing is hard and lazy journalists love playing Top Trumps with stats.
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My LG washing machine is rated as very efficient. I suppose it is, unless I actually want a shirt that does not stink. Then I have to select 'prewash', 'extra water', 'extra rinse' and 'heavy soil'. I also have to give it an extra shot of HE detergent and a good dose of Clorox 2. And the cycle takes 2 hours to run. At least I do not have to wait on the dryer.
Dishwashers these days are even worse than washing machines, but I blame a lot of that on the no-phosphate detergents. The no-phosphate detergents fai
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At one time, there were real gains made in home appliance efficiency, but regulators and politicians continued to push efficiency past what physics allows to kiss the asses of the environuts who failed high school physics, so you are left with a reasonably efficient appliance now made mostly useless by "green" regulations that violate the laws of physics and/or chemistry (like removing the phosphates from dishwasher soap http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/... [npr.org] )...
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but even bureaucrats cannot bend the rules of physics
They don't need to. By setting standards engineers focus on areas that they didn't in the past. You can heap crap on the bureaucrats all you want but the modern appliance is far more energy / water efficient than it was in the past precisely because of this focus. The fact that your eco button doesn't work as well is an isolated case, kind of like how I don't need to full flush a toilet after a brief piss.
Who uses the eco button? I do. It depends highly on what it is I am washing, but after party where near
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The eco program on my dishwasher focuses on conserving water, not electricity - it heats the water as needed. I've never had dishes not come out clean on mine running in eco mode and it's eight years old now.
Cheating has always happened (Score:2)
This is no different than a certain car maker's vehicles knowing when they were being tested and responding accordingly or how a certain graphics card manufacturer built drivers that would know when they were being benchmarked and adjust the behavior of the card.
LK
This is not news. (Score:2, Interesting)
They do, it has been long known by anyone over 30, oh millennial. They also continue to use power if they are turned off but plugged in, physically unplugging unused appliances will noticably reduce an electricity bill. It's one reason rechargeables are not a panacea, one must still charge them. Again, this is common knowledge to anyone born before 1978. I think we were actually in better shape in terms of understanding these things 30 years ago, the seeming magic of 21st century tech makes people think it
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1970: Turn on a typical state of the art "solid-state" color TV. Sound output almost instantly, semi-watchable video 1-2 seconds later, and stabilized video with reasonably proper colors within 2-10 seconds (depending upon how long the TV had been "off" prior to turning it on).
1985: Turn on a typical mid-priced color TV. Sound output before you had time to lift your finger from the power button on the remote, watchable video within a second, stable video & proper colors within a second or two. We don't
Recognizing Test Conditions (Score:2)
There is at least one very good reason to recognize test conditions: predictability of test results.
As a company, you perform in-house testing to understand the characteristics of a device prior to sending it out for official review. You don't want any surprises. The test conditions are public, and known (as they should be). So, rather than rely on the competence of the official testers (or lack thereof), you make your device recognize the test conditions, and put it into a standard configuration. That
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If the test can be gamed, it sucks. Period.
What you say here is the equivalent of Software having bugs isn't the problem, it's all the malware's fault if you get infected. Yes, the malware abuses those faults, but the faults enable it in the first place.
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Putting together rules on optional functionality is also a minefield, should a TV that uses 50% less power than a rival in normal mode be penalized because it can offer HDR (the rival can't) but when doing so it uses 10% more power
Marketing gives the answer.
The energy usage when used with HDR needs to be as prominently displayed compared to the energy usage when used without it as the marketing material is for highlighting HDR compared to non-HDR.
If they market it as a HDR TV, that use is what needs to be highlighted. If they also in smaller letters say what the lower energy usage is if not using HDR, that's fine.
Just like a car marketed as a city car should highlight the city mileage, and a truck marketed for hauling heavy loads s
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What the fuck does a single video clip have to do with standardization? Nothing. I've taken standardized tests before. Like the USMLE [usmle.org]. Guess what. There is more than one question and the questions are designed in such a way that just memorizing stuff will pretty much guarantee failure. But of course a lot of time goes into question design. Playing a single video clip and attaching an oscilloscope to a TV is a really lazy way to do things.
If you're making a test, you expect cheating. Why? Because if everyo
Re:In other words: (Score:4, Informative)
There are different ways of gaming tests. For example, if a CPU manufacturer knows that a particular test suite is likely to be used which does a lot of integer multiplications and not so many subtractions, they might optimize their processor to be faster with those instructions at the expense of others, resulting in lower real world performance but higher performance on the test. That would be a problem with the test.
However, actively recognizing a particular test film and then changing settings to lower image quality and energy consumption for that particular film, that's a whole different story. You can't blame the test for that, it's simply deliberate fraud.
What else are the testers to do? Show random films? Then the manufacturers will complain that the test for their TV set had more bright scenes and therefore was unfair to them. Tests have to be identical, so there's no way around using a standard film.
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Make the standard file "Star Wars," or something else that would enrage the mobs if the film quality were poor. Or a suite of several movies. After all, testing isn't a 15 minute affair. Let the films play back to back overnight while equipment is gathering results.
Difficulty [Re:In other words:] (Score:2)
No - have a "test film of the month". too little time to add "recognition", and still fair. All tested in the same month get the same movie. More fun for the testers too. . .
Since in any given month only one new television model is likely to come out, in practice that would mean every television would be tested using a different film.
If different films require different amounts of energy use, that would lead to a test that is randomly harder to pass for some models and easier for others.
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Tests have to be identical, so there's no way around using a standard film.
The obvious answer is to keep the test corpus a secret, so that people can't design to the test. Then you only need some mathematical way of proving that the test is meaningful without revealing the footage.
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The obvious answer is to keep the test corpus a secret
Security by obscurity would provide an incentive for corrupt government employees to either leak the test details, or cheat by misreporting the results, since independent verification would be impossible.
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Test films don't have to be identical, they just have to be equal. Chopping up the video and mashing it back together in a random order would keep things fair, while making it harder to detect. There are other tricks that could be done to make sure that the test videos are all equal, without being the same. Also they would be run multiple times and averaged (which I believe is already the standard procedure) so that small differences induced by sudden brightness changes would tend to even out. (It's not lik
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Perhaps one film with the scenes randomly reorganized?
Not Fraud: Optimization for Test Criteria (Score:3)
But it is not fraud, it is the manufacturer setting up the TV to the most conservative, test-favorable settings while the test is being run (this is completely reasonable and expected). It is possible that the TV can be viewed in this power saving, low resolution state, but if we the viewers want that UHD with HDR and high brightness, the TV can use more energy to accomplish this. The real culprit here is incompetent bureaucrats (surprise, surprise) and the test for not specifying a baseline resolution, b
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What else are the testers to do? Show random films? Then the manufacturers will complain that the test for their TV set had more bright scenes and therefore was unfair to them. Tests have to be identical, so there's no way around using a standard film.
There are solutions to this. You can release a new film every year and report performance across the multiple years of testing. That way you'll be able to see that the TV released in 2016 consumes much more energy on the 2017 film. You'll also be able to see trends from one manufacturer to the next that can point to monkey business
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Students caught cheating fail their exam. So these TV sets should simply be taken off the market.
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Then do what Consumer Reports does, buy a few units of each model at random stores - run all the various models for several weeks continuously (if a fridge, if a TV, have a 8h daily period) under a standard protocol, not test, and the meter should output a reliable weekly, monthly, and yearly usage.
That's essentially what they do. What this article says is that the devices detect the standard protocol and run in a special reduced-power mode.