Originally Posted by
Warb
Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, there are a couple of issues with many of these products.
Firstly, and most obviously, they cost a fortune. You can buy a dishwasher for $600, but the cheapest Miele is three times that, and they run up to over $5000. This is the same problem as with heat pump water heaters - when an old style hot tank costs $1000 or so, the additional $4000 investment in a Sanden buys a lot of power. Overall these products may save money, but you have to be able to afford that upfront cost, and (in our disposable, "if it's not new, it's not cool" society) you also have to intend to keep them for many years.
Secondly, the eco cycles tend to take forever to run. In our house we have energy and water saving laundry appliances. They do, I have no doubt, save both water and electricity, but they don't save time. To use the "most saving-est" cycles takes hours longer than the standard cycles on an older machine, which is a problem if you're trying to do all the family's clothes and bedding on a Saturday morning....
There's actually a third issue, which as is the case with many of these "save the planet" products, relates to marketing and usage. The marketing says the product uses x% less power, and under a fixed set of circumstances that's true. But in the bigger equation, replacing a functional unit with a new one that saves x% means that the embedded carbon cost of the new one needs to be factored in. It has taken energy to make and transport the new product, so how long will the savings take to recoup those costs? Will it actually be kept long enough for that to happen? And will it be used in the correct manner to achieve those savings, given that the savings may apply to one specific "cycle" which may not be the one chosen - those energy saving washing machines still retain the high energy usage "boil washes" of old.
The marketing also often relies on "assumptions" which can vary enormously - the estimated break-even point (in carbon terms) for a Tesla Model 3 varies between the 15,000-25,000km suggested by Reuters, through 150,000km suggested by Damien Ernst (University of Liege) up to 700,000km (Ernsts original estimate, later revised downwards). We've already discussed the financial break-even point with PV and batteries being somewhere between "a long time" and "longer than the life of the batteries", but both financial and carbon break-even points are often quite long, and indeed may never actually be reached!
The other big problem of having the entire "save the climate" movement being driven by the desire for corporate profit, is that by necessity it involves selling something, whether the something is a dishwasher or the power itself. The power companies don't really want you to use less power, that cuts their profits (unless they jack-up the price). And the manufactures of dishwashers will say and do anything to get you to buy a new dishwasher. The end result is that neither organisation will tell you the truth, which is that the greatest saving for water, power and money is probably to keep your old appliance but only run it on a low temperature cycle when it's actually full!! When that old appliance finally dies, replace it with an energy and water saving unit, but don't bother replacing it simply because the new version is a tiny bit better..