Our water heater came with our house when we moved in 14 years ago, and kept chugging along, sucking up electricity and turning it into, more or less, enough water for 3-4 consecutive showers (the last one was always a little iffy). We never drained or serviced it, though we did wrap it in a coat of insulation way back in 2012. That was pretty much all the attention it ever got. In 2015, we confirmed through a smart meter that it really was sucking up a ton of our electricity bill.
The energy guide sticker made it seem comparable--even "better" than other hot water heaters. But considering this was early 00s technology at the latest, it really didn't compare to what was available now.
We wanted to get something more efficient. And more important, to me, we wanted to do it on our terms and our timeline, rather than panic-buying something when the water heater inevitably decided to give up the ghost one day (probably in the middle of winter, too).
D did a lot of research and decided we should splurge on a hybrid hot water heater. This went against the opinion of the experienced HVAC guy who installed it, who insisted we were wasting our money. A hybrid system can heat the water 2 different ways. It has an old-fashioned immersion heater, just like our old hot water heater (albeit far more efficient 20 years later). These heat up water relatively fast and are a tried and true, decades' old type of technology.
The hybrid part comes from the fact that it also heats the water with a heat pump. Now I didn't really know what a heat pump did, though D has bemoaned the fact for years that we don't have one along with our AC (combo units weren't really when we replaced ours in 2015), since they create heat so much more efficiently than standard heaters. The whole story is here (specific to water heaters, though the principle works the same for heating). Here is the key:
Heat pump water heaters use electricity to move heat from one place to another instead of generating heat directly. Therefore, they can be two to three times more energy efficient than conventional electric resistance water heaters. To move the heat, heat pumps work like a refrigerator in reverse.
They require that the room they be installed in stay above 40 degrees (there needs to be some heat in the air to pull from), with a lot of air (they don't work well in closets). Our basement satisfied both those requirements. Because they pull end up pulling moisture out of the air along with the heat, they also tend to dehumidify a room. Considering we run our basement dehumidifier constantly, that seemed like an amazing twofer.
What makes our water heater "hybrid" is that it can do both. Since heat pumps can take a while to heat the water, we didn't want to commit to having a very slow system with four people who all take showers within about an hour of each other. The heater lets us pick how we want to heat our water:
Efficiency means "only use the heat pump" and we're trying that out to see if we can manage with just the most efficient system. So far, so good, at least in the warm summer months (more heat to pull out of the air, cooler showers, etc). The electric setting would turn our unit into a standard water heater. And hybrid, of course, lets the heater pull from both heat sources as necessary.
We also got a bigger tank. The new heat pump is 67 gallons, while the old one was 55. This gives us more ready-to-go hot water. We discovered that once the water reaches the right temperature, it can hold that temperature for a while. We know that because the heat pump is quite loud, blowing a fan sort of like an AC unit. So we can hear when it's running, at least from in the basement. When it got installed, it ran for about three hours nonstop and then didn't start running again late in the evening after two showers.
This new AO Smith is taller but it's actually quite sleek and nice looking. Because of the way it pulls heat in and dehumidifies, it has to drain. Our HVAC plumber installed this rather hilarious/awful piping out the bottom, to the wall under the utility sink, and into the drain. We wanted to drain it there since our rightmost utility sink has a crack in it.
But the pipe was so awful that we decided to risk it, assuming that the amount of water generated by the heat pump won't be enough to be a problem for the sink. Now the pipe doesn't stick out awkwardly into my laundry area.
Here's the whole scene, after some decluttering yesterday as we moved around some shelving and purged some unnecessary junk (hampers we never used, the drying rack to our older dryer).
The system was expensive (our HVAC guy certainly thought it was pointlessly expensive) but there are state and federal rebates for upgrading to this kind of water heater, and we're seeing about 5kWh used each day, which equals about $1. Not a ton, of course, but it adds up (and probably will add up to more in the winter when we use more hot water). More importantly, we (hopefully) have a water heater that will last us another decade or more without concern.
Bye, old faithful!
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| Old water heater loaded in a truck to be removed. |
