They ruined the toilets, the showerheads, the dishwashers, the clothes washers and dryers, the irons, the refrigerators with ice makers, and the gas cans, not to mention the gas itself.
Is there anything else that regulators can ruin with new mandates over manufacture and design in the name of saving resources? Oh sure. How about those hot water heaters? The Department of Energy is ready to wreck those too.
Reuters reported: “The U.S. Department of Energy on [July 21] proposed energy efficiency standards on water heaters it said would save consumers $11.4 billion on energy and water bills annually. ... The proposal would require the most common-sized electric water heaters to achieve efficiency gains with heat pump technology and gas-fired water heaters to achieve efficiency gains through condensing technology.”
At this point, I didn’t need an expert to explain it to me. We already know that whatever the government is proposing here 1) won’t save money but rather raise costs to the consumer, 2) will work less well, and 3) won’t save energy. As with most reforms along these lines, there’s some hidden industrial interest out there that stands to gain and probably has the ear of a politician whose office shepherded this nonsense through Deep-State corridors.
“That’s because they extract heat from the surrounding air ... warm air that your furnace will have to work harder to replace. There’s ‘no free lunch’ from these water heaters in the winter.”
In other words, if you want a heat-pump water heater, just buy one. Nothing stops you. The regulators are gaming the results by mandating some products over others, same as with cars and thousands of other consumer products. We’ll never know how much in the way of innovation we’ve lost because of the safety and efficiency mandates from government.
Some years ago, I did some research into lawnmowers to figure out why mine was constantly clogging up with grass. I found that the government had mandated a design that forces the edge of the mower to drop so low that air couldn’t get in, hence the clogging. This was supposedly for safety—thus creating a very safe mower that didn’t actually mow well.
This is extremely common in consumer goods now in the United States. If something doesn’t work right, doesn’t do the job, and ends up as expensive and annoying, it’s a strong bet that the reason traces to some idiotic government regulation over design.
The water heater has been a target for decades. Hot water in homes was one of the greatest innovations of the Gilded Age. It gave us hot baths without a slew of servants going from kitchen to bathroom carrying pails of water. It gave rise to washing machines and dishwashers. With hot water on demand, bacteria and other pathogens die before they get to our skin.
Also, boiling hot water was the basis for the first generation of indoor heating after wood-burning stoves. Even today in the Northeast, indoor radiators provide a moist and comforting heat throughout areas of cold climates that simply can’t be matched by “central air.” I would take radiator heat indoors over every other option, especially that which is produced by a “smart” thermostat.
For years, I’ve hacked my own water heaters to crank up the heat to 130 or 140 degrees. This is because I noticed that they were shipped to heat water to only 110 degrees. This is the temperature at which yeast rises. In other words, the tepid water produced by this setting is the best friend of germs and other muck. Crank it up and you get actual hot water that cleans both skin and clothing.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed that the ability to hack them has become ever more difficult, requiring special tools or some other impossible trick. I could tell what was going on; it has been a long-developing war on the hot water heater. This was all in the name of safety, of course, but there’s more going on here. Government has become the enemy of a functional and comfortable life. The attack on water heaters is only the latest.
There’s a broader point here that highlights an even more fundamental problem. The Department of Energy, like hundreds of other agencies, operates without any meaningful oversight by elected representatives. This has been going on for many decades as all these agencies crank out crazy changes in product design with no real legislative mandate. They offer nothing other than a comment period and are under no legal obligation to pay any attention to either the people or the elected branches. This is only the latest example, but this habit of central planning by administrative fiat is a massive disease in government today.
At some point, the Supreme Court is going to have to rein in these agencies and their discretion, if only to restore the operations of government to something more approximating constitutional government in the United States. The doctrine of “Chevron deference”—in which agencies’ interpretations of legislation must prevail over the interests of anyone harmed by the rules—has to be reversed.
It’s true that administrative interventions have been a problem for a hundred years at least, but the ethos has changed. In the New Deal, the bureaucracies were trying to give industrial progress a kick forward. They built dams, dug quarries, and pushed for new factories. The goal was economic progress itself, and this idea motivated much of what the federal government did all the way through the 1970s.
In the 21st century, the motivation has changed dramatically. Instead of using government power to attempt to make us richer (which was never a good idea), the purpose today is to unravel prosperity by force by taking away our functional appliances and giving us ever fewer options.
Did you ever wake up and step into the shower only to discover that there’s no hot water? It’s a deeply unpleasant shock. Well, if the Department of Energy gets its way, this will become ever more common. It won’t start this way. It starts with time limits on how long you’re allowed to shower and how much water you can use. It'll eventually affect everything, including whether you can even clean your clothes.
Mark my words: They want us back to boiling water on our mandated electric stoves.
