High Efficiency Products

 In a recent blog post, Penni McLean-Conner of NSTAR, highlighted the tremendous innovation spurred on by the new EISA standards enacted on January 1.

Congress and the President are set to pass a spending bill that will, among other things, defund the enforcement of the EISA light bulb standards for the 2012 fiscal year.

Nearly every consumer appliance and electronics program developed in the past two decades has left considerable energy savings on the table.  How do I know?  Because until this year, program administrators lacked tools to help steer consumers from appliances and electronics that were merely more efficient than standard

Yes Halloween is just around the corner, but we’re not talking about those types of vampires or phantoms. What we ARE talking about can be just as frightening — vampire or phantom loads refer to the appliances and electronics that draw electricity from your outlets even when they are turned off. The constant sucking of electricity these products produce not only are a drain on your electrical system but they are killer to your electric bill.

To the surprise of many, water heating is the third largest energy expense in the home behind space heating and cooling.

Future appliance standards could eliminate growth in residential sector energy use through 2035, according to an analysis conducted for the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook 2011. While modest improvements to the efficiency of products "covered" by the federal appliance standards efficiency program will achieve sizable savings, by adopting more aggressive standards for the products currently covered and by adding new products to the program (i.e.