I came upon a diary this saturday all about the evils of ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) and how the standards it sets led directly to the purchase of a crappy water heater. I could not fit in all I would like to say about the inaccuracies portrayed in the diary in a single comment. So if you're interested follow me below.
To start I want to sympathise with the diarist. Her water heater obviously did not meet her expectations, and that sucks. However... Somehow, that equated into it being the environmental movement's fault that tougher energy standards were introduced, which directly led to crappy engineering, which directly led to all of her headaches.
Unfortunately A does not necessarilly follow B and then arrive at C.
The first problem is that this might not even be a result of crappy engineering, but of crappy installation. Even the greatest engineering marvel will fail if installed improperly.
The second problem with this argument is that even if it is faulty engineering, that is entirely the fault of the manufacturer. To have them push it off on the environmental movement is a cop out. For the diarist to do it for them shows a certain ignorance of how things work.
Case in point ANSI regulates materials and manufacturing. These standards are for how almost everything is made. They do not regulate performance. Which is to say whether or not the thing will even work in the first place. The biggest organization in the US for that is ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers), and even they don't mandate performance. For that you have to go to the good ol' US congress, or your state gov, or in some instances your local gov.
Now I don't have a problem with people cursing out the manufacturer when shit goes wrong. Hell as an architect it's part of my job description. Still 9 time out of 10 the problem is in the installation. That's why manufacturer's love to hand out those material warranties. They are almost never collected on. Ie. Your roof warranty is only good if there is a manufacturing defect. If it was installed wrong - which is a hell of lot more likely - your shit out of luck. sorry:-( But to blame the standards as somehow too stringent for the manufacturer's to meet, makes me want to ask the question... Do they pay you?
Regulatory agencies are an easy target. Nobody likes them, which is why your technician thought he could bitch them out with impunity. But the fact is, that regulator for your pilot light was mandated by the regulators to save lives. Enough people died because it wasn't there that the responsible parties decided that from now on it would be there. That is how codes work, and trust me when I say I find them more annoying than you ever could.
The bigger question is what does all this have to do with the efficiency movement. You know those damn environazimentalists who dare to think that somehow we can do better than we are doing now. Where's my damn 100 mile per gallon car already.
In the engery crises of the 1970s we decided that the average refirgerator needed to be more efficient than it was to save our country oodles on the price of energy. Industry said it couldn't be done. The engineers said let us try. And today we have refrigerators that on average use less than half what they just 30 years ago. But hey why would we want to do better.
In 1992 the US passed the Energy policy Act which led to the creating of the energy star rating system. In 2000 it was ammended and updated. In 2005 a new energy policy act was passed, and again in 2007. These pieces of legislation along with similar laws at the state and local level are where those damned envirnazimentalists are making their biggest impact. This is the way that we are headed as a nation. It's forward progress and at times it's a pain in the ass, but never does it have anything to do with ANSI(unless it's life threatening) and it's almost always an easily reached minumum goal. See this is how it works, Congress doens't like to set goals it can't reach - at least when they actually write stuff down, what comes out of their mouths is altogether another thing. These pieces of legislation aren't the best we can do, in most cases they are those things that we can achieve very easily.
So to be clear we are not setting these goals too high to reach.
A typical performance standard, which again is not ANSI(materials and manufacturing) but ASHREA(Performance), has two options for compliance. Performance or prescriptive. Performance compliance follows that the manufacturer will measure or create an analytical model to measure the actual preformance of something, say a water heater. Prescriptive compliance follows that the manufacturer will create a product in a manner that has already been tested and is assumed to pass based on previous tests of a similar product. Presciptive is easy and is the method that most designers will follow. But just because they followed the assumptions on how to design something doesn't mean it will actually work. You see there are variables that the regulators just can't see. That's why they will always give the designer the option to prove to them that what they propose will work and might even work better.
Now I will assume that the water heater in question was desgined with a prescriptive compliance path. And I will assume that it passed its performance tests under perfect installation and ideal conditions. That doesn't mean it was designed or built for shit. These standards which we rail against and blame for all of our woes are a Minimum. They are not the very best, hell sometimes they are just barely good. But the fault in the product lies wholly within the manufacturer or the installation. It is their job to get it right. To rail against the standard is like saying the test is too hard so lets get an easier test. What we need in this country are harder tests, not easier ones.
Another thing about ANSI. It's an industry standard. The industry loves these standards because they level the playing field. Brand 'X' can't say its product is the same as brand 'Y' if they don't both meet the same ANSI standard.
So to be clear these standards are set by the industry to which they pertain. As much as those damn ivory tower enivronazimentalist would like to be involved in the process, they aren't. You have to be a member to be involved in setting the standards because its done by consensus, which as we all know is the best way to bring real cutting edge change. You have to be a member to view the standards because that's how they pay for testing and the random audits they conduct. Yes that's right. ANSI shows up at the factory to make sure that the factory owner isn't putting melamine in the milk powder. But hey we should just trust the factory owner right. I mean who would put melamine in milk powder. Or formaldehyde in dry wall. Or...
Oh wait newer stricter standards are bad because they lead to faulty design.
Actually, faulty design leads to faulty design. This really isn't some vast conspriacy created by people who haven't addresed real world concerns. These standards come out of real world concerns. Like people blowing down their house because they store gas next to their pilot light. You can't fix stupid, you can only try to find a way to minimize the damage it does.