So I have been waiting to see what  new changes will be updated to this site.

I'm slightly confused by what direction this site is going. The word green means so many

different things to so many people. I have been looking through the Appliance categories,

many of the descriptions lack the power consumption used.

This site is blindly linking to products with no guidelines

I'm not sure how a product makes it to the top listing?

What would be great is a brief summary of what to look for in a products technology over

another. For instance my most important feature for an air conditioner would be the

EER rating. Higher is better, so anything over 9.7 as a base  I would know that any EER

rating over 9.7 is going to save me more money on electricity costs.

There is no section for cooking. which I find wierd considering it is one of the most

energy consuming activities. After some research I have found that induction cooking

seems to be the way to go, but it requires special metal pots and pans to take advantage of the

technology. Speaking of Cookware there is a company that makes Thermo cookware

named Kuhn Rikon from Switzerland, they make double walled, double lid, double base pots. This reduces the electricity usages considerably. Also, ovens that use convection heat seem to reduce time and energy cooking meals.

Anybody that owns energy eficient cooking appliances please send me some info.

Thanks

Thanks for the great feedback Gulag. Sorry we weren't more public with the push around the recent category expansion, but we did add Personal Care, some Green Yard categories, and Paper Products in "Clean Green". We'd still like to get into more building envelope suggestions as well, and I like the idea of cooking products, but it takes time.

We have been a bit quiet on the expansion because we're working to implement a much, much easier system to allow users to add products that we don't have. This should go live in the next week and we plan to add more new categories then and try just to supply 10-ish products to each in hopes that you all can help us flesh out what else needs to be there.

For your question regarding inclusion criteria, when navigating through the products (by clicking the product tab), when you get to the lowest level, e.g. Products -> Heating and Cooling -> Air Conditioners -> Window Mounted you'll see that at the top right corner of the page we do publish suggested inclusion criteria for products in that category.

In the Window Mounted AC description, we suggest that Energy Star AC units could save 1.2 million pounds of greenhouse gas emmissions and that you should keep an eye out for units with an EER of 9.4 or greater. We've done our best to publish these for each category, but I like your suggestion to be clearer about cost savings.

As for how the products within a category are ranked, I agree it would be nice to rank based on EER, etc. For now, each category gets ranked by a combination of overall Star Rating and # of Reviews. Essentially, something with 10 reviews and an overall star rating of 4.5 stars will get ranked higher than something with only one 5-star review. In these early stages, it's difficult because many categories of products have not received reviews - any suggestions of how to get folks there would be appreciated.

I can't thank you enough for the constructive feedback, I hope this clarifies some things. We're working very hard to improve and I think you'll like many of the imminent changes.

Please keep the feedback coming and let me know what else we can do tio make the site better,

dan

I echo Dan's sentiments with thanks for the feedback.  I also just wanted to mention that if you click on the "specs" tab for different appliances, we have compiled as much energy information (kWh used per year, EER, SEER, etc) as possible. 

Thanks again, Gulag!