A free-market group is calling on Energy Secretary Rick Perry to speed up dishwasher wash cycles, which are taking hours to clean the dishes — hopefully — and have become a “royal pain” for consumers.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned Perry Wednesday morning to roll back energy-efficiency standards for dishwashers that are making the wash cycles twice as long as what they used to be. The long cycles are becoming a top complaint for consumers.
The Washington libertarian group wants the Trump administration to ensure dishwashers take no more than an hour to complete their wash cycles, which is how long they took a decade ago.
“It used to take you only an hour to get a full load of dishes washed and dried in your dishwasher,” said Sam Katzman, the group’s general counsel. “Today, thanks to federal energy efficiency standards, the average time is nearly 2.5 hours.”
Katzman said the added time is “not progress; it’s bureaucracy.” For consumers, it’s a “royal pain,” which Katzman hopes Perry “will change course” to correct.
The petition refers to General Electric research data on customer satisfaction. “A survey of 11,000 dishwasher owners by GE Appliances demonstrates that cycle time is one of the four biggest sources of dissatisfaction of consumers,” the petition reads.
Common responses included complaints about the cycle taking four hours while leaving the dishes unclean. “I am currently in the process of hand washing a number of dishes that did not clean in last night’s 4-hour cycle,” one response read.
Eight million dishwashers with run times over an hour were sold last year, the group said.
The petition proposes that one-hour cycles be included “as the defining characteristic for a new dishwasher class.” It said adding the new class of dishwashers would not interfere with the current efficiency standards, but would add a new category.
“Manufacturers clearly have the ability to satisfy these consumers, and the DOE has the discretion under the law to accommodate them,” the petition read. “It should do so.”
