The Energy Star Program is "a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy helping us all save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices" (Photo courtesy of Energy Star)
The federal government’s Energy
Star program is supposed to highlight
products that save you energy and money.
Rebecca Williams reports some independent
testers found Energy Star might be falling
a bit short:
Transcript
The federal government’s Energy
Star program is supposed to highlight
products that save you energy and money.
Rebecca Williams reports some independent
testers found Energy Star might be falling
a bit short:
The magazine Consumer Reports tests all kinds of products to see how they
stack up. They were testing refrigerators when they stumbled on something
odd.
Steven Saltzman is a Deputy Editor with Consumer Reports. He says the
Energy Star program relies on government standards that are outdated in some
cases. For example, one standard is to test a refrigerator’s energy use with the
icemaker off.
“But we found that when you turn the icemaker on – the refrigerator actually
used twice as much energy as it would with the icemaker off.”
Saltzman is not saying you can’t trust the Energy Star label. But he says the
tests need updating. And there’s a dark Energy Star secret, manufacturers get
to do their own testing in most cases – so there’s not a whole lot of third party
checking going on.
For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.