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Domestic Appliances Guzzle Far More Energy Than Advertised, Says EU Survey (theguardian.com)
Chrisq writes: An EU study has found that many electronic devices and appliances use more energy in real-world conditions than in the standard EU tests. Often the real world figures are double those in the ratings. Sometimes this is achieved by having various optional features switched off during the test. For example, switching on modern TV features such as "ultra-high definition" and "high-dynamic range" in real-world test cycles boosted energy use in four out of seven televisions surveyed -- one by more than 100%. However some appliances appear to have "defeat devices" built in, with some Samsung TVs appearing to recognize the standard testing clip: "The Swedish Energy Agency's Testlab has come across televisions that clearly recognize the standard film (IEC) used for testing," says the letter, which the Guardian has seen. "These displays immediately lower their energy use by adjusting the brightness of the display when the standard film is being run. This is a way of avoiding the market surveillance authorities and should be addressed by the commission."
Very Widespread
People game standardized tests. Graphics cards, benchmarks, cars, students, teachers, if you have a standardized test, people will put in the effort to game the numbers.
Maybe they should do what they do for TV : recruit a random sample of people, stick an energy monitor on their appliances, and see what happens.
Next they're going to tell us that automakers somehow game the emissions tests. Yeah, like THAT'S possible.
-Styopa
My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?" It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.
I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.
Has anyone done an energy study to estimate how much energy is consumed by EU "market surveillance authorities" and even the EU apparatus itself? Perhaps if we recognize the EU as a special case and stub the whole thing out with a rubber stamp, people will be able to watch HD television and toast four slices of bread at once and with former EU personnel in the workplace everyone will be able to work one less day a week with same pay.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
See: Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
In this case it was obvious a long time before the VW thing that the power consumption figures were understated, although the specific usage of defeat devices of the kinds being described is new. Anyone who has deployed some of those power monitors that sit between an appliance and the socket to see how much power a given device is drawing over time will be well aware that peak, average and idle power draws for a given device are typically above those stated, and often by a considerable margin. The only real question here is why it took so long for those that were doing the regulatory tests to realise that something was amiss and dig a little deeper - more average Joes complaining after deploying smart meters in efforts to go green, perhaps?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
If you have standardized tests, people will do what's necessary to perform well on those standardized tests and ignore anything else. What happened when schools got them? Every teacher began teaching to the test, i.e. what will be asked at this test, everything else was simply swept under the rug. Why? Because it won't be tested, so it's superfluous. Actually harmful, because it will take up valuable time and brain capacity for no gain.
No gain at the test, that is.
Same here. Your test will perform X, so we'll do good at X. And on nothing else.
There's also that problem that customers want cheap TVs that have great features, and that is pretty much the exact opposite of power conservation. You cannot build cheap TVs that have all sorts of features, great resolution, high contrast, fast switching and so on, and don't consume much power.
Now take a wild guess which of the three things "cheap", "performance" and "compliance" gets thrown out the window? Hint: You can't fire cheap, because that's what both the maker and the customer wants. You can't cut performance, because the user would eventually notice and a huge stink ensues on various test sites on the internet. And compliance is something that gets tested once and nobody really gives a fuck about it.
So pick the one that you could do without.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The article is indeed worth a read. I couldn't imagine a maker of hardware saying today "Yeah, I wrote that cheating routine myself, that way we come out on top every time a comparison is run, pretty clever, eh?"
They may THINK that, but I doubt they'd have the chutzpah to just throw that in your face.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Increasing the cost of bringing an appliance to market might not be too bad a thing. Have you tried to read reviews for white goods recently? The manufacturers churn models so quickly that by the time one has been reviewed it's no longer being produced and so you have to just hope that the next model has similar characteristics. Giving manufacturers an incentive to keep them on the market for a bit longer would be beneficial to consumers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
toast four slices of bread at once
*sigh* These Euro-Myths never die, do they? No matter how often they are debunked, they just keep coming back.
Here is the source of the claim, it's literally one sentence on page 56: http://www.ecodesign-wp3.eu/si...
A bunch of liars, sorry "journalists", claimed that this meant the EU was going to ban two slot toasters. Such a plan never existed.
Later a new variation on the claim referred to 4 slot toasters because the EU was considering minimum efficiency standards for heating and cold storage kitchen appliances. Of course, there was never a ban - you can make a 40 slot toaster if you want, it just has to use reasonably efficient heating elements and mechanical design.
watch HD television
We have had HD television broadcast over the air for more than a decade in Europe, and you can't buy new SD televisions any more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...who really uses the "green" program on washing machines or dishwashers? If the artifact mostly soaks in lukewarm water for 4 hours and comes out still dirty and with remains of detergent, it has to be washed again. No energy was saved. One can always set goals, but even bureaucrats cannot bend the rules of physics just by creating arbitrary standards.
There are different ways of gaming tests. For example, if a CPU manufacturer knows that a particular test suite is likely to be used which does a lot of integer multiplications and not so many subtractions, they might optimize their processor to be faster with those instructions at the expense of others, resulting in lower real world performance but higher performance on the test. That would be a problem with the test.
However, actively recognizing a particular test film and then changing settings to lower image quality and energy consumption for that particular film, that's a whole different story. You can't blame the test for that, it's simply deliberate fraud.
What else are the testers to do? Show random films? Then the manufacturers will complain that the test for their TV set had more bright scenes and therefore was unfair to them. Tests have to be identical, so there's no way around using a standard film.
Make the standard file "Star Wars," or something else that would enrage the mobs if the film quality were poor. Or a suite of several movies. After all, testing isn't a 15 minute affair. Let the films play back to back overnight while equipment is gathering results.
--Jim (me)
Not likely. Smart meters are one of those things forced upon consumers by power companies whenever they get an alternative power source like solar panels installed.
In California, they tried to force them on everyone, period. But they are shit. When they fail they fail in favor of the power company, or they let smoke and fire out. Meters that have been working for literally 30 or 40 years get replaced with "smart" meters that fail in 30 or 40 days. Not every time, of course, but way more than is acceptable. PG&E even gave a third party contractor the gate code so that they could come install a smart meter after we had formally opted out. PG&E is literally evil in every way in which it is possible — they do, after all, willfully kill people for profit, so this negligence is just the tip of a very large iceberg... which is melting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just dishonest companies. The difference between the EU and the US, the EU has rules against this.You want to game the system in Europe? Sure, go ahead. It's a self-certification. You can game it all you want, you probably will get products through, no problem. But wait until you get caught because someone reported you and questioned your documentation, then your top level employees can't even get into Europe because they'll all have an arrest warrant for them. Then you can kiss all your prospects in the EU goodbye.
I've been watching the EU clamp down big time on this sort of thing in the past two years, especially radio interference tests which is required for all electrical products. Many companies are completely ignoring these required tests and I've seen many burned, especially in the US and China (You think the US doesn't try to ignore things like China? Sometimes they're worse because they argue why they have to do it!!).
Already watched plenty of companies burned for thinking they can just put the CE mark on everything they want only to get burned by their own client when they questioned their documentation of use of standards and don't comply with anything.
Students caught cheating fail their exam. So these TV sets should simply be taken off the market.
This is no different than a certain car maker's vehicles knowing when they were being tested and responding accordingly or how a certain graphics card manufacturer built drivers that would know when they were being benchmarked and adjust the behavior of the card.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They do, it has been long known by anyone over 30, oh millennial. They also continue to use power if they are turned off but plugged in, physically unplugging unused appliances will noticably reduce an electricity bill. It's one reason rechargeables are not a panacea, one must still charge them. Again, this is common knowledge to anyone born before 1978. I think we were actually in better shape in terms of understanding these things 30 years ago, the seeming magic of 21st century tech makes people think it actually IS magic. Nope. It's the same as its ever been, it's just more well-hidden from the user now. Kvetch and pontificate all you like, but it's true.
Did you even RTFA? They are blaming the smart meters for the high readings, not the bulbs!
love is just extroverted narcissism
They made it look as though this was the first ever violation of any kind by a car manufacturer and somehow more evil than anything else that had ever happened, even though it quickly became clear how widespread similar tricks are.
So, they cheated, they lied about how they cheated, and they became the world's largest car manufacturer as a direct result of the fact that they cheated, but the anonymous cowards are popping up on slashdot saying it's all political.
"Everybody cheats, why single out VW merely because they did it on a larger scale and deliberately" is not an excuse.
What the fuck does a single video clip have to do with standardization? Nothing. I've taken standardized tests before. Like the USMLE. Guess what. There is more than one question and the questions are designed in such a way that just memorizing stuff will pretty much guarantee failure. But of course a lot of time goes into question design. Playing a single video clip and attaching an oscilloscope to a TV is a really lazy way to do things.
If you're making a test, you expect cheating. Why? Because if everyone was honest you wouldn't need a test in the first place, you could just tell manufacturers to comply and expect them to do it. Therefore if you're designing a test to ensure compliance, you need to design it to catch cheaters not encourage them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Not true. And VW did not have "some of the lowest real-world NOx emissions."
It is true that, after the VW scandal, investigations revealed that six other car manufacturers used strategies in optimizing their emission controls to lower emission in testing but not in real world conditions. But VW did not merely optimize their controls for test conditions-- they actually had software to detect the fact that testing was going on and turn on emissions controls that were off the rest of the time.
VW deliberately, consciously cheated, in order to make the claim that diesel was "clean" and take over the car market. (And to avoid paying for the Mercedes emissions-control technology). They cheated more, they cheated worse, they cheated more flagrantly, they cheated deliberately.
Then do what Consumer Reports does, buy a few units of each model at random stores - run all the various models for several weeks continuously (if a fridge, if a TV, have a 8h daily period) under a standard protocol, not test, and the meter should output a reliable weekly, monthly, and yearly usage.
That's essentially what they do. What this article says is that the devices detect the standard protocol and run in a special reduced-power mode.
Your 'direct result' assertion is unadulterated bullshit. Insert quarter to try again.
Classic diesels got better gas mileage but had worse emissions. Volkswagen made the claim that they had solved that problem: they could make diesels get the better gas mileage and also get low emissions... and also sell at a reasonable price!
They were partly right. When they geared up to break into the US market with their diesel passenger cars, there actually was a pretty good low-emissions diesel technology... but Mercedes owned it. Their original plan was to license the Mercedes technology, but the company had a change in CEO, and the new CEO decreed no, we won't buy another company's tech, we can develop our own.
But their home-developed tech wasn't harder than they thought, and it couldn't simultaneously meet the emissions standards, still get the gas mileage, and have performance acceptable to Americans. Unless they cheated.
So, the bottom line: they broke into the US market with their "clean diesel" for exactly one reason: they cheated.
They didn't do it on a larger scale, aside from being plain bigger.
Wrong. They did it on a massive scale.
We found many car manufacturers whose cars were tuned in some specific way to beat the regulatory tests, and performed horribly in any real-world scenario--typically on-par with the VW offerings.
You missed the point. VW did their cheating not by merely choosing settings that performed well on the test but not as well in the real world. VW actually cheated: they detected the test, and turned off their emissions controls.
Yes, other companies also had poorer performance in the real world. Check for example, the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/en... ."
"the diesel cars [from other manufactures] passed the EU’s official lab-based regulatory test (called NEDC), but the test has failed to cut air pollution as governments intended because carmakers designed vehicles that perform better in the lab than on the road. There is no evidence of illegal activity, such as the “defeat devices” used by Volkswagen
The obvious answer is to keep the test corpus a secret
Security by obscurity would provide an incentive for corrupt government employees to either leak the test details, or cheat by misreporting the results, since independent verification would be impossible.
The only solution is strong consumer laws. In the UK products must last a "reasonable length of time", which in practice means if things like white goods that you would expect to last you a decade fail after three years you can get at least half your money back. The exact amount can ultimately be determined by a court, but generally if it lasts half as long as you would reasonably expect you get half your money back or a warranty repair.
This creates a great incentive for shops to sell good brands that last, because it's the shop that is on the hook for the cost.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
But it is not fraud, it is the manufacturer setting up the TV to the most conservative, test-favorable settings while the test is being run (this is completely reasonable and expected). It is possible that the TV can be viewed in this power saving, low resolution state, but if we the viewers want that UHD with HDR and high brightness, the TV can use more energy to accomplish this. The real culprit here is incompetent bureaucrats (surprise, surprise) and the test for not specifying a baseline resolution, brightness (in nit), and contrast ratio that should be adhered to for the test. Modifying the test parameters to define those settings and validating them with external sensors would create a consistent baseline for the test rather than wasting man hours coding firmware to recognize the test film.
This is akin to loading your truck to it's weight limit, doing jackrabbit starts from every stoplight, pumping the gas and brake incessantly while driving and then complaining that your car gets 2x the advertised mileage. The reality is that how you use your things affects how efficient they are.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Your test will perform X, so we'll do good at X. And on nothing else.
So you just need to make your test comprehensive. If the car emissions test had involved fitting measurement devices to real consumer's cars at random, the cheating would have failed.
The EU vacuum cleaner tests are a good example. They test on multiple surfaces with a very good approximation of house dust, so the cleaning ability, energy consumption and emissions are all measured accurately. The main criticism is that they only measure with empty dust bags/bins, but the next version of the test is going to fix that.
You cannot build cheap TVs that have all sorts of features, great resolution, high contrast, fast switching and so on, and don't consume much power.
History demonstrates that to be untrue. TVs have been steadily getting more and more efficient over the years. CRTs became LCDs, CCFL backlights became LED, the image processing chip lithography got smaller and more power efficient, even as the amount of work increased. Standby power decreased by orders of magnitude too, and there were even savings from including set top box functionality into smart TVs. Most of them use ARM processors, which have got much more efficient mainly thanks to phones and tablets.
All the while the image quality has been getting better too. Contrast improved a lot when the change from CCFL to LED was made, for example.
The purpose of these regulations is to make sure manufacturers don't do what happened with vacuum cleaners. Bigger, more powerful motors because consumers equate big motors with better cleaning. In fact most of them just produced more heat, while cleaning much worse than Japanese models that used 1/4th the power, because in Japan consumers were prioritizing good cleaning and low power consumption. So now the EU puts a star rating on vacuum cleaners to show how well they clean, while limiting the motor size so that the manufacturers actually have to innovate instead of just applying more and more suction until it rips your carpet up.
This is why we have brush bars now. Available for decades in Japan, but not in the EU because consumers only cared about MOAR WATTS.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Later a new variation on the claim referred to 4 slot toasters because the EU was considering minimum efficiency standards for heating and cold storage kitchen appliances. Of course, there was never a ban - you can make a 40 slot toaster if you want, it just has to use reasonably efficient heating elements and mechanical design.
The problem in Europe is not the toasters, but the toasting products. Because sliced bread is now made very tall, toasters have become taller to accommodate it. However other toasted products like (English) muffins or crumpets remain the same size or slightly smaller than they used to be. This means getting my crumpet out of a toaster involves angling it and using the cancel button to eject my crumpet at speed whilst calculating the parabolic arc to ensure that it lands on the plate on the breakfast bar and not on the floor of my kitchen. All the time trying not to get burned because metal toasters are fashionable.
As I'm constantly getting 3rd degree burns, I end up using the top down griller to toast crumpets, which I'm certain is less energy efficient than a toaster.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
No, I said there is absolutely a place for multiple choice, and was talking about testing in general rather than SATs specifically - which I didn't mention at all. The trick is to find the right balance between establishing that the student *knows* the subject, for which multiple choice tests are fine, and that they *understand* the subject, for which free form text/essays/dissertations or verbal discussion is usually much better. The problem is that the costs and skills required for marking the assessment go up as you progress from multiple choice, leading to more of a bias towards multi-choice, which in turn leads to more bias towards teaching the exam rather than teaching the subject. The solution is have a better mix of question types - multi-choice, set answer, *and* essay - that is appropriate for the subject at hand, but someone is going to ultimately have to pay more for it and that's where the real problems are.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
They made it look as though this was the first ever violation of any kind by a car manufacturer and somehow more evil than anything else that had ever happened, even though it quickly became clear how widespread similar tricks are.
So, they cheated, they lied about how they cheated, and they became the world's largest car manufacturer as a direct result of the fact that they cheated, but the anonymous cowards are popping up on slashdot saying it's all political.
"Everybody cheats, why single out VW merely because they did it on a larger scale and deliberately" is not an excuse.
VW's problem is two fold.
1. They got caught.
2. The way they cheated.
Everyone, including the regulatory agencies know you'll never get laboratory figures out in the real world. If I want to know the MPG of the 2er I'm getting, I'll ask people who already have said 2er (online forums for everything means this has usually already been asked and answered). However the state of tune of the engine in the laboratory must be the same as the state of tune of the engine on the road. VW cheated by changing the tune of the engine when it detected test conditions.
Everyone plans for the test, everyone games the test, but that isn't cheating. VW basically used a different engine configuration for the test and that is a strict no-no. Because stages of turbo tuning can change engine characteristics significantly, this would be like Ford taking the 4-pot mustang to the tests and then using those figures for the V8. Beyond just being shady and dishonest, It could end up costing owners megaquid if it wasn't discovered this early because here in the UK, as in many other countries cars older than 3 years have to undergo yearly testing which included an emissions test and the car might not detected the test conditions when parked up at the MOT centre. If you fail the emissions test your car is illegal to drive making the car worthless to sell and expensive to fix.
Also such tests do need to be carried out under laboratory conditions because they are comparisons between different automobiles. So we need to control as many variables as possible. Yes this makes it easy to game, but that is an unfortunate consequence for the need for an accurate comparison between disparate cars.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.