On Demand Water Heater - way to go

If you have a hot water tank, you might consider replacing it with an on demand water heater. A water tank heats and reheats itself all day and all night to keep a large volume of water warm for immediate use. It doesn't care if you are using it or not, it keeps heating it for you.

It doesn't care if you're home or not, it keeps heating it for you.

Worse yet, the exhaust on a gas fired hot water tank includes a flue that drafts cold basement air up through the tank and out the stack. Guess what?

This drafting out the stack helps cool the tank continually, and thus encourages it to reheat the tank more frequently.

If you replace your hot water tank with an on demand water heating unit, it only heats water when you call for hot water. How about that for an energy saving tip? You use energy only when you need to use it.

The drawback of this type of heater is that it takes water running through the pipes to activate the unit and start heating, so the response time for hot water won't be immediate.

Also, these water heaters usually can't handle more than one or two loads at a time. Lastly, they are considerably more expensive than a standard hot water tank. So, this might be a good energy saving tip, but it will cost more up front to implement.

Here is a good illustration of how this works.

If you need to replace your hot water tank anyway, you might choose to implement this tip and save energy, but I wouldn't toss out a perfectly good water heater until I had to.

An on demand water heater is nice to have, but if you toss out a perfectly good water heater, you're just adding to the cost of the on demand heating unit.

Done with On Demand Water Heater, back to Ways to Save Energy