Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker
Congratulations on the good job.
It was very kind of the dehumidifier folks to make such an attractive shroud for your heat pump!
Really, that's about as straight-forward a solution to improving the efficiency of a water heater as I can imagine. Well done, really well done.
As I recall, you saved the water heater you used from scrap hell. So you might not know its age. At any rate, someone mentioned way before on the 'Manifesto' thread, that having a heat pump instead of 220 volt heating elements, would be much less stressful on the inside of the water heater core, because the temperature cycling is less extreme, and also because you don't have high amperage elements cycling inside the tank, that can accelerate corrosion. I have no way of proving those assertions, but I pass them on along because they sound so intuitively correct.
Keep us posted on the measured efficiency.
Also, it should be a pretty easy matter to keep track of energy costs over a few typical months and compare that with the cost to run the propane heater, from similar months.
Best,
-AC
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Yeah the water heater was set to go to the scrap heap. The only reason it was being discarded was do to a remodel of the room it was in. It is 15 years old but we don't seem to have problems with rusted out tanks around here. My previous homes heater was 26 years old with no probs. the propane heater I just took out of my parents house was 29 years old. When I hooked the hose up to the drain port to empty it the water came out purfectlt clean, no signs of rust. And that was the first time it had ever been done.
Hv23t