LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) -

On April 16, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act (NAECA) will have new standards when it comes to how efficient water heaters are, so if you're planning on getting a new one, you may want to make room at home and in your pockets.

"To the consumer on energy saver, this will increase," said Stine assistant manager Travis Hoffpauir. "Your yearly operating cost will increase over a year's time."

Aside from saving you some money and energy, the new water heaters are going to be bigger. They're going to be 2 to 8 inches taller and 2 to 6 inches wider, depending on the model. So, fitting it in your house cocoulde an issue.

"It depends on the spaces," said a local homeowner as he shopped. "Some people have them underneath cabinets and some people don't."

Hoffpauir said those people who have their tanks in a tight closet with very little room may see most of the change. According to WashingtonEnergy.com, the changes will require custom install solutions to fit some homes and apartments, which may cost homeowners more money.

They also anticipate retail price increases in the range of $100.

If you have a large size tank (66 or 80 gallon) or 75 gallon gas water heater, some of these are being discontinued.

But there is some good news, the change will eventually save consumers money on their utility bills, but Hoffpauir said that may take awhile to happen.

"It's hard to tell if they'll even see the savings," he said. "They projected it over a whole year's time so, you're not going to see a great saving immediately on your electric bill."

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New federal regulations to affect water heater purchases

Penny Porter

Penny Porter is a full-time professional writer and a contributor to "Kraze" magazine. She is pursuing a bachelor's degree in journalism at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky.

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Building a brick walkway often seems like an intimidating task, due to the time and attention to detail necessary to piece the walkway together. This task seems more intimidating when you make the decision to build a curved brick walkway. Building a brick walk that includes sharp or gentle curves requires additional steps to cut the bricks to fit the space before installing or laying the bricks into the walkway's space. Laying a curved brick walkway may take more than a week to accomplish.

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Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps: is he for real? Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

Last week, I betrayed the homosexual parenting community. At Elton Johns insistence I tried to boycott Dolce & Gabbana, which was a great sacrifice for me, as other designer underwear makes my testicles look old.

As I have been appearing at a theatre in Dundee it has been difficult to find any Dolce & Gabbana outlets to boycott. Instead, I located a second-hand copy of Joe Dolces Shaddap You Face single in Grouchos records on the Nethergate, and pointedly refused to buy it.

But it has been a troubling week. News events, coupled with the liminal experience of spending time in Dundee, have conspired to make me doubt my own existence. And that of others. And that of all matter. It is the fault of the government.

Earlier this week the Conservative party chair Grant Shapps was revealed to have operated, even while an MP, a variety of ethically translucent internet business funnels under the alias of Michael Green, pseudonymous author of a book called How to Get Stinking Rich. Grant Shapps even wore a badge saying he was Michael Green at a 2004 conference, though apparently this was a joke, but one so subtle that many people took it at face value. Now he knows how I feel writing these columns.

Green, a non-existent man, marketed software that steers Google search engines towards particular information, manipulating our perception of reality. Fittingly, most traces of this Michael Greens HowToCorp company have since been erased from cyberspace, perhaps by his own software, jammed in reverse gear with an imaginary spanner.

How disorientating. Some 25 years ago now, in 1990, a young Grant Shapps hired me as the sole employee of his profitable live bait vending business, House of Maggots, which I didnt over firmly deny in the Observer last March. Grant Shapps and I spent many a moonlit night at popular Suffolk angling spots filling roadside fridges with comatose larvae, discarding maggots that failed to thrive, talking about our dreams. But who was the Grant Shapps that I imagined I knew all those years ago?

In August 1989 Grant Shapps had a car crash near WaKeeney, Kansas, on Interstate 70, his companion probably falling asleep at the wheel. Speaking to the Welwyn Hatfield Times in 2011, at the opening of a refurbished McDonalds in the region, Grant Shapps confessed: I was in a coma for the best part of a week and when I came round I recuperated in a Ronald McDonald home. Ive always been grateful to Ronald McDonald. Could this bizarre incident be significant?

The spring of 1989 saw a surge of UFO sightings in Kansas, clustered principally around the town of Russell, 60 miles west on Interstate 70 of Grant Shappss subsequent accident. The UFO-spotting season closed spectacularly in November 1989 at Goodland, 111 miles east, on the same road, when two women were abducted by aliens, and left unable to account for three hours of their evening. And in between those two spates of alien activity, geographically and temporally, lies Grant Shappss own crash and coma. Could this be the point at which the reality-moulding entity known as Michael Green somehow took possession of the future Conservative party chair? Did Grant Shappss Kansas blackout provide a gateway for the little Green man?

Given this Michael Greens self-professed ability to use software to rewrite our perception of our own history, and our own reality, I wondered if there ever was a Grant Shapps, as we understand him, at all? Grant Shappss Wikipedia entry is known to have been regularly and favourably massaged by unseen hands. But are these hands alien hands? Are they green? Could this Michael Green have inserted a rebooted Grant Shapps character, who never really existed, into our reality by a similarly deft manipulation of online records?

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If Grant Shapps was made by little green aliens, whats left?

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