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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.
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.
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.
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.
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