Bright ideas

Shopping for a lightbulb today, I was pleased to note that Philips (at least - there may be others) have started to display the expected lifetime of their various bulbs on their boxes. In our increasingly energy conscious society it seems like a commendable idea, and hopefully one that should give shoppers pause to consider the false economies involved in buying cheaper bulbs.

It also started me wondering whether a similar idea should be extended across all electrical appliances. Not their expected lifetime - I imagine that would prove rather troublesome, but say perhaps the amount of energy they'd typically consume an in year based on average usage, perhaps in kilowatt hours (it would also be terribly helpful if energy companies would also provide customers with the cost of electricity in kilowatt hours for this purpose). Imagine, for example walking into an electrical store and being able to tell at a glance how much the usage of a particular appliance would cost you over a year or longer. I realise that in this country we already have labelling for appliances, rating them A to F for efficiency, but this strikes me as an abstraction too far and it certainly doesn't give consumers any indication of how much more A rated appliance will cost them to use relative to a B rated item or lower. I can imagine that the present system will encourage a subset of enlightened purchasers to choose the more environmentally friendly option, but I doubt it would have the visceral impact of raw pounds and pence figures.

It's a thought anyway.