Accredited Appliance – Appliance and Equipment Standards

What are appliance and equipment standards? Well, appliance and equipment standards are policies laid down to improve energy efficiency while saving the consumer energy and money. The Department of Energy (DOE) in the U.S. has come up with an Appliance & Equipment Standard Program that targets more than 60 products. This represents almost 90 percent of home energy consumption, 60 percent of the commercial building energy use and 30 percent of the industrial energy consumption.

Appliance and Equipment Standards

However, Building Technologies Office (BTO) has come forward to implement the minimum energy conservation standards covering more than 60 types of appliances as well as equipment. This is quite encouraging and very helpful to end users of appliances and equipment whether at home or on an industrial scale.  Due to the fact that these standards are put in place to shield consumers from incurring high energy costs, many Americans have managed to save a staggering $63 billion on the utility bills in the year 2015 alone. In fact, it is projected that by the year 2030 savings from the cumulative operating costs from all standards since 19187 will rise exponentially to hit a $2 trillion mark. This is good news to the consumers and the government in general. Many professional appliance repair companies like Accredited Appliance are taking notice too. Accredited has been aware of the benefits of these energy efficient appliances for a few years now.

What is the work of Appliances & Equipment Standards Program?

The Appliance & Equipment Standards Program has come a long way to see that consumers can save a lot of money on their utility bills. To achieve its mandate, the program is tasked with the following:

• Provision of key resources to enable consumers to make sound decisions when purchasing their appliances or equipment so they may save on energy and money as well. The program recommends consumers to acquire their products from eeCompass because it stocks easy to use tools. These tools allow consumers to do some research on the products, evaluate and make comparisons between different brands and models besides other performance attributes.

• The program goes ahead to issue regulations (for appliance and equipment) standards as well as test procedures, certification, enforcement, and implementation.

• Issuance of waivers on appliance and equipment test procedures.

• It guides further in the implementations of some helpful regulations.

• Gives an announcement on comment deadline, public meetings, and information on when to start participating in meetings and explains clearly how to get access to rulemaking documents and dockets.

• The program provides support to the ENERGY STAR by working in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency in order to check on the products and ensure that they meet Energy Star regulations.

• Through the Regulatory Cooperation Council, the program works in collaboration with the National Resources of Canada.

Finally, it provides enough information regarding its own history and impacts, regulatory processes, statutory authorities, plans and schedules including publications and program reports.

Conclusion

Appliance and equipment standards programs aim at protecting the consumers and aid them in using energy efficient products.  Since the inception of the program, it is evident that a large percentage of consumers have benefited in one way or the other.