From Guest Blogger Lizzie Weakly: How to Make your Home Plumbing More Energy Efficient
There’s nothing quite as frustrating as high energy bills. An energy inefficient home can also help contribute to pollution and global warming. Many home owners may be looking for new ways to make their homes more energy efficient.
One part of your home you may have not considered in regards to energy consumption is your plumbing. However, your pluming may be wasting a lot of energy. With that in mind, below are a few steps you can take to make your plumbing more energy efficient.
1. Make Sure Your Pipes Are Insulated
If you want to make your plumbing more energy efficient, you need to make sure your pipes are properly insulated. This way warm water will stay warm as it moves from your water heater to fixtures in your shower, tub and sinks. Install foam or rubber insulation around these pipes. Without them, you will lose a considerable amount of heat especially during the winter. During the summer, the insulation will help prevent the pipes from “sweating” so much moisture.
2. Insulate Your Water Heater
Similarly, your water heater can also be insulated to help increase energy efficiency. You can insulate it with something known as a water heater blanket. Purchase one at a home improvement store and secure it to your water heater with some duct tape. This insulation blanket will help the water heater retain its heat. This will prevent less of that heat from escaping to the air. As a result, less energy will be needed for the water heater to keep water warm.
3. Upgrade Your Water Heater
If your water heater is ancient, chances are it wasn’t designed with energy efficiency in mind. According to Knights Plumbing & Drain, your water heater could actually be consuming anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of the energy in your home. When looking for a new water heater, look for one that advertises its energy efficiency. Buying one with the Energy Star label is a smart choice. Using such a water heater could end up saving your family as much as $330 a year in energy bills.
4. Lower Your Water Heater’s Temperature
If you want to save on energy bills, you should also consider lowering the temperature on your water heater. Most water heaters come set at 140 degrees Fahrenheit as a factory default. However, 120 degrees may be adequate for your needs.
While you may not have considered it before, your plumbing may be contributing to your high energy bills. Consider using one or more of the above tips to increase your plumbing’s energy efficiency.
Sometimes advice found on the web is worse than useless as it represents out of date and poorly researched information by authors who really don’t know their subject. The mindless application of insulation as advocated here can cause repair bills, frozen pipes and water damage.
Insulation applied to cold water pipes can reduce condensate forming on the piping. But if pipes are only partially insulated the condensate forming section of piping can be moved from harmless utility areas to sections of piping behind walls.
Blankets were popular on water heaters prior to about 15 to 20 years ago when more heavily insulated water heaters were manufactured. With a warranty period between 6 to 12 years for most water heaters the advice to blanket a water heater may be practical for only 1% of the water heaters in use today.
Domestic water heaters today are limited to 140 deg F. as compared to those 15 to 20 years ago which had a limit of 180 deg F. The Medium setting is now about 120 deg.
Insulation applied to hot water pipes may reduce the delivery time of hot water but it will not reduce energy bills in the winter where escaping heat will simply contribute to the heat in a home.
Insulating pipes in a freezing environment may cause the pipes to not receive sufficient heat from the home quickly enough to keep them from freezing. Burst piping and the damage done to a home to repair them in walls can more than offset any energy savings. Insulation reduces heat flow in both directions. More is not always better.
Some of the suggestions in the article are very dependent on individual situations and must be evaluated accordingly. Here is a suggestion which was somehow omitted and which can save water:
Instal a hot water recirculation pump. We can, over time, waste considerable water while waiting for the hot water to reach the tap. Ideally each tap would be connected to a hot water loop through which water would, by a pump, be circulated from the water heater and back thereby making not water quickly available at taps without wasting water. However, leaving the pump running 24 / 7 would waste energy. The solution is to have a button near each tap which, when pressed, would cause the pump to run just long enough to circulate the water through the loop. For more information, here is a link:
https://www2.buildinggreen.com/article/new-demand-hot-water-recirculation-system-taco
In existing houses it is not always practical to have a hot water loop since they require a return line. There is a solution for that too as you can learn from the link. However, when building a new house, a hot water loop should be included as I did when I had my new house built.
Install a drain water heat exchanger so you are recovering the heat that would normally go right down the drain and your water heater won’t have to work as hard. No sense throwing away perfectly good energy.
Brian,
I heard of those the first time a few decades ago. I don’t doubt that they can save some energy. Perhaps I should have looked into them before my new house completed in 2009.
Is there any practical to install a drain water heat exchanger in existing houses?
Are they legal in all places?
I installed the one in my 50+ year old house in 2005 when we had sewer installed in the neighborhood because I was getting into that system anyway. I hooked it up finally in 2007 when I was making some other plumbing mods to the house. It was an easy install. It works great. I don’t know of anywhere they are not legal. Here is a video. Let me know if you are interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx6A8455t6M
Because my house has no cellar the device could not be installed to work for the entire house. The only place I can see where it could be installed is for the upstairs bathroom. It might be reasonable to install a small one to capture heat from the shower drain and transfer it to the cold water pipe to the shower to reduce the volume of water from the water heater. It seems a bit iffy in my case. However, for many houses it looks like a good idea.
If there is a common sewer exit it is possible. For houses without basements a pump box is installed to pump the drain water to the top of the exchanger. The amount of energy recovered substantially exceeds the amount of energy used to run the pump. They have this worked out.
I understand how that could work. However, many of us would be reluctant to instal such a system. A pump failure caused either by a problem with the pump or by a loss of electrical power would be more than inconvenient. A plugged sewer line would be more difficult to deal with. Surely the installation cost would be significant. It is questionable whether the return on the investment would be sufficient to justify the cost.
Probably consideration should be given to change building codes to require heat recovery drain heat exchangers in new homes. If installed during construction, probably the additional complication of having a sewage pump could be avoided.
It would be better to avoid the pump but the box they recommend has an in flow and an out flow such that if the pump fails the water simply fills the box and flows out the other end eliminating the fear of any kind of disaster. I am sure I could get pictures if a setup from them. They use it on slab type setups.
This thread is going to run off my page and I am starting to forget to check it. If you want more information send me an email at bigvid@comcast.net and I will provide.