Home Improvement

Sunday night the water heater at my place on Mermaid Lane (home of The Sirens) gave up the ghost. I cleared my schedule and set about looking for a replacement.

As part of my online shopping, I researched the stimulus package and found that yes, there was a tax credit for installing energy-efficient water heaters in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. I was pleased to see this, thinking that with 30% of the cost coming back to me, I might spend more to buy a better heater, something cheaper to feed that would last longer, maybe I could even pay somebody else to deliver and install it.

I read that not all appliances that meet the federal Energy Star guidelines qualify for credits, but I printed out a nine-page ASHRAE listing of approved manufacturers models, and started shopping around.

Nothing on the Lowes or Sears sites qualified. I don’t usually shop Home Depot because they’ve sponsored Bill O’Really, but I checked their site too, same deal.

Next morning I called local plumbers and supply houses to no avail. Everybody had cheap contractor models for sale, but if I wanted something more than 80% efficient, I would have to special order it and be taking cold showers while I waited.

Same thing happened to me with central heating and AC. If I had installed a new efficient system in 2007, I could have had a nice tax break on the deal. There is also a credit for equipment installed in 2009. We put ours in last year. No tax credit. It did save us from being hosed when electric rates shot up last year. We had a contract with DynaWatt run out and they dumped us in a plan that charged $0.27/KW.

But beyond the vagaries of tax law, and the whims of the wind-blown sluts in Congress, this is another example of shortsighted American business planning. When Toyota and Honda were developing hybrid vehicles Detroit was lobbying Congress to subsidize sales of 5,000 lb. sport utility vehicles.

While Americans use twice the energy per capita as people in Western Europe or Japan, Congress and the energy lobby are sandbagging Obama’s energy legislation as if we can go on like this forever. (Shell Oil and Conaco-Phillips are exceptions, partnering with the Environmental Defense Fund to find and implement best practices to reduce carbon emissions. Guess where I’m gassing up.) We can’t afford this. It’s a drag on our economy, it skews our foreign policy, and it’s changing the weather.

As the late great Frank Zappa said, we’re “dumb all over, a little ugly on the side.”