Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker
I think you have guessed right.
These combined forums are infested with dreamers and fools, and with a few practical folks to keep things occasionally reasonable.
You will need to start thinking in energy units, like kilowatts for starters.
Do some poking around about water heaters, and your water heater in particular. You need to know its power consumption over time, like a month perhaps.
You'd also need to know about your typical heating and cooling requirements over time, in the same units (kilowatts) so you can compare.
If your house is monumentally low-performance (leaks lots of heat & cool), compared to your water heater, then the marginal gains that could be made by combining your water heater, would not be worth the trouble. In this case, you should direct your project energies to improving your house thermal efficiency, starting with infiltration...
But if your house is very tight and very well insulated, and the difference in scale between house energy and DWH energy is comparatively small, then it would be prudent to continue your quest.
Best,
-AC_Hacker
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The good news is that I have been spinning my wheel on this thinking for a while and actually have a lot of the figures you say I will need.
We actually have 2 other buildings that are well insulated on the property. I currently have a centralized utility room in the house of the basement which has 2 natural gas boilers. One is steam for the radiators of the house and the other is hot water for radiant heat in of the out buildings and low temperature baseboard for the other building.
When I was planning the heating for the 2 other buildings I did all sort of heat-loss calculations. We also recently installed a PV solar array that I did all sorts of calculations.
I guess I should comb the site more and come up with a small project to get my feet wet.
I got hooked on the site seeing all the dehumiders being turned into water heaters.
Thank you for the the thoughts.
Ben