Heating, Air-conditioning, & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) on July 10 issued a statement saying it supports a proposed law that would change the compliance deadline for regional HVAC standards from the date of installation to the date of manufacture.

Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Arizona, introduced the SMART Energy Efficiency Standards Act, which would amend the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to “ensure regional standards for furnaces, central air conditioners, and heat pumps are applied to products based on their date of manufacture instead of installation,” according to a June 27 news release on Lesko’s congressional webpage.

“HARDI has pushed for a fix for this unequal treatment of distributors and contractors since the bill became law in 2007,” said HARDI CEO Talbot Gee. “Regional HVAC standards are the only Department of Energy efficiency standard that uses date of installation to determine compliance. Distributors are asked to risk millions of dollars to have the products the market demands in inventory and this flaw in the statute directly penalizes HVAC distributors and ultimately hurts consumers while doing nothing to actually improve energy efficiency or carbon emission savings. This deep inequality between the implementation of HVAC efficiency standards and every other DOE-covered product should not continue. HARDI thanks Congresswoman Lesko for her leadership on this issue.”

When 2023 began, new energy efficiency standards for spit-system residential air-conditioning went into effect using regional standards, HARDI said in its statement. Non-compliant equipment remaining in the Southeast and Southwest regions was banned from installation, “creating dead inventory, distributors in the northern states were unaffected by this change and can still sell remaining inventory,” the association said.

“Using the date of installation is a failed policy that does more to hurt the goals of energy efficiency than it helps,” said HARDI Director of Government Affairs Alex Ayers. “Anyone opposed to ensuring all DOE standards use the date of manufacture is unwilling to see the reality that this equipment does not simply disappear when the compliance deadline passes, the equipment is shipped to an unaffected state, increasing the carbon used to produce and ship the equipment where it is still installed. Congress should look to ensure smart energy efficiency standards are implemented, not wasteful policies that hurt distributors, contractors, consumers and the goal of increased energy efficiency.”

Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, has co-sponsored the bill.