A Year After DOE's Efficiency Rollback, Three Rules Are Gone and Four Are Back

One year ago this February, Energy Secretary Chris Wright postponed seven Biden-era appliance efficiency rules. What looked at the time like a two-year regulatory freeze has since broken cleanly into two piles. Three rules are gone, killed by Congressional Review Act resolutions through 2025. Four are back, finalized as test procedures and in force today.

The neat 4-and-3 split matters for installers bidding 2026 projects. The postponements are not the story anymore. What Congress did next is.

What Actually Stuck and What Didn't

The four test-procedure rules among the seven were technical — how DOE measures efficiency, not minimum performance thresholds. Those were reopened, revised in places, and pushed through to finalization. Central air conditioner testing, commercial refrigeration testing, walk-in cooler and freezer testing, and air compressor testing now run on the current test procedures. Manufacturers had mostly tooled up for the new methods by late 2024 so the practical disruption was limited.

The three killed rules are the ones that would have tightened minimum efficiency. H.J.Res.20 struck down the water heater rule, the one that would have ended sales of non-condensing tankless gas models by 2029. That was the piece drawing the most California installer attention because non-condensing units fit a broader range of venting retrofits at a lower price. Those are now staying on shelves indefinitely under federal law.

H.J.Res.24 did the same to the walk-in cooler and freezer standard. H.J.Res.75 killed the commercial refrigerator and freezer rule. Both had been producing late-2024 and early-2025 product redesigns at the major commercial equipment OEMs. Those redesigns aren't being reversed, but the regulatory floor is no longer there either.

What This Means for California Installers

Title 24 and the California Energy Commission's appliance rules operate independently of federal standards. In water heating, commercial refrigeration, and several other categories, state rules are already stricter than the now-defunct federal ones would have been. Contractors working California exclusively can treat the federal rollback as informational, the state keeps its own goalposts.

Multi-state operators have it messier. A HVAC company serving California and Nevada now faces a patchwork. California installers can't sell the non-condensing tankless unit the federal CRA preserved if Title 24 blocks it, and the state's appliance efficiency database (MAEDBS) is the authoritative source for which models qualify in California.

For related coverage, see our earlier piece on how the House voted to roll back DOE efficiency standards and the DOE 2027 standards original rollout.

The advocacy side has not gone quiet. The Appliance Standards Awareness Project has continued publishing analyses of the CRA repeals and the likely next round of DOE rulemaking. A new administration in 2029 can restart the standard-setting process, but under the CRA, any replacement rule has to be "substantially different" from the one Congress rejected. That constraint will shape whatever comes next more than anything happening in Washington right now.