What should I do with my 176-year-old water heater?
We need to make it easier to avoid paralysis-by-analysis when weighing the economic and environmental value of “stuff”
My home’s water heater is 176 years old, in appliance years.
I am thankful daily for its 22 years (in human terms) of service, especially since it was expected to last just 10. But all good things come to an end, and it’s best to prepare for the transition before catastrophe hits. I can be thrown way off my game without a long hot shower.
When I was 25, sharing a three bedroom apartment, my response to this situation would have been “not my problem; let the landlord deal with it.”
When I was 45, living in a condo my wife and I owned, it would have been tempting to say “let’s sell and let the buyer deal with it.” (A few years later, we were the buyers who had to deal with just that…and a broken sewer line, among many things.)
Now, those options are off the table.
That leaves about 5,000 possibilities to sort through, especially because we want to account for the environmental impact of our choice.
There’s refurbishing, though in our case, that would be the equivalent of chemotherapy for a 90-year-old cancer patient.
There’s buying a used heater. But there are some things for which I’m not inclined to rely on the kindness of strangers. A “previously owned” 500 pound device that can explode like a bomb or rocket up 850 feet is one of those things.
Then, there’s buying a new heater. You can choose from heaters powered by electricity, natural gas, the sun or hybrids of some or all of the above. Each can come with tanks holding 20 galls, 50 gallons — even 90 gallons of water. There are even tankless heaters; they just scorch the water on demand. Home Depot alone has 544 varieties.
Each has its own array of up-front prices, installation costs and operating expenses. And each has a different set of environmental impacts. Some are fairly easy to calculate (gas vs. electric), but others require a lot of digging, from considering the materials used to build the appliance to the cost of transporting it from the manufacturer.
Then there’s the “apples and oranges” problem of comparing the dollars-and-cents figures with the value of its environmental bona fides (or lack thereof), such as reducing air pollution or saving the natural habitat from mining.
And you probably don’t even want to get into the concepts of sunk costs, marginality and discount rates.
It’s no wonder that so many Americans throw up their hands. Most will (at best) decide “if the money is about the same, I’ll go with the greener option.” Others will simply punt, hoping against hope that their heater lasts another few years — only to have to pay extra when the end comes suddenly.
What’s the result of this paralysis-by-analysis?
More heaters ditched in landfills or, at best, picked apart for scrap metal. (Recycling is becoming increasingly difficult, because of the common use of plastics in heaters.)
More new heaters built, sold and installed, predominantly using natural gas, with all of the negative consequences for the environment of those choices.
And, in the long run, consumers paying more than they need to.
So, what is to be done — not just about my water heater, but about all of the devices we now take for granted, whether it’s AirPods to cars?
Here are four, not-mutually-exclusive steps:
1. Reduce your wants. I don’t absolutely need to take what my wife tells me are 30 minute-long showers, even though some of my best ideas come to me while being soaked. Cutting back to, say, 15 minutes would allow us to get a smaller tank (saving us a couple hundred dollars up-front) and reduce our energy bill by $100-$200 per year. And we’ll save precious water and energy.
The more the public can be persuaded to internalize “post-scarcity” ways of thinking, the better off we’ll all be.
2. Better labelling and calculators. Compared to when my parents bought a new water heater in the 1970s, today’s consumers have access to a lot more and better information about the economic and environmental costs of appliances and cars. (Every day, we should send a little thank-you to the PIRGs, Consumer Reports and Ralph Nader and other consumer advocates.)
But there’s still a lot of room for progress.
For example, the legally-mandated stickers on new cars for sale tell you the MSRP and gas mileage, and even how much you should expect to spend on fuel over time. But they don’t describe the car’s “lifecycle carbon footprint;” that is, how much climate-change-causing carbon will be emitted during the car’s lifetime, from manufacture to operation to disposal. That information exists, with great level of detail (including, for electric cars, the carbon emitted to produce the electricity where you’ll drive). But you can imagine that many car manufacturers are not eager publicize that info.
It will take pressing legislators and regulators — and non-profit consumer organizations — to make that information more widely available and user-friendly.
3. Financial nudges. Life’s a lot easier to navigate when everything can be measured on a single scale. For most Americans, that scale is “dollars and cents.” So the more that the environmental costs of stuff can be expressed in monetary terms, the more likely the average person will do the environmentally-correct thing.
Such is the genius of ideas ranging from 10-cent deposits on returnable bottles and cans to carbon taxes. Yes, there are inevitably huge debates about what the price of environmental degradation should be. But let’s not let that stop us from trying as much as possible to, as economists put it, “internalize the externalities” — that is, include the “external” costs of a product (those that are paid by others, like loss of habitat and public health) in its upfront price.
4. Mandates and bans. If all of the above fails or there’s not enough time to wait for them to take effect, simply requiring environmentally-preferable products or banning bad ones has to be the fallback option. Laws such as renewable energy standards and bans of incandescent light bulbs may not be the scientifically-ideal solutions to the problems they tackle, but they’ve often been the most effective — simply because legislators have been willing to pass them, while turning down proposals that are theoretically more efficient.
My wife and I haven’t decided what to do about our heater. And frankly, it probably wouldn’t help you if I described our ultimate solution because every family’s situation is different.
That, ultimately, is my point. Having a huge number of options for tackling our world’s economic and environmental problems is a good thing. (Ask anyone from the old Eastern Bloc whether they’d prefer to go back to the bad old days of grocery stores with a single item for each product.)
But the lauded efficiency and liberating value of “free market” economic theory depends on all of the market’s participants having adequate amount of information and time to make decisions. And even with the enormous amount of data available via the Internet — in fact, sometimes because of that huge quantity — it’s really hard for us consumers to make the right decision.
I don’t want to spend even 176 minutes trying to decide what to do with my 176-year-old water heater. Helping me and you make that choice more quickly and accurately seems like something that most everybody, regardless of their partisan affinities, will support.
