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Old 12-24-14, 11:59 PM   #11
oil pan 4
Land owner
 
Join Date: Nov 2012
Location: NM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by thx712517 View Post
Cree LED bulbs to replace our incandescents. Faucet aerators to reduce flow down to 1 gallon per minute or less. Low flow shower heads. It's simple and cheap.
Use LED. CFLs have a really horrible power factor and draw around twice the amps you think they do.
For get those low flow heads, the first thing I do is strip out the restrictor in them.
I do this for few reasons.
I use full flow to wash my dog. A weak stream seems to ultimately use more water to rinse the soap out of their thick fur. The dogs really hate getting a bath, after a few minutes they want out and some times they do get out and it makes a horrible mess.
Next reason is to get hot water faster.
Then I can turn down the water flow by hand to a trickle, I don't need the shower head to do that for me.

In our next house the bathrooms are on the opposite end of the house from the hot water heater and it takes forever to get hot water over there and getting hot water over there wastes gallons of water every day.
So what I am going to do is install a circulating water pump with 2 control mechanisms.
1 a temperature switch when the water at the circulating pump gets warm enough there is no point in keeping the pump going.
2 install a timer switch in each bathroom that will only allow the pump to run when needed and automatically turn off after 20 or 30 minutes so when the water in the line cools off and no one is home there is no point in continuing circulation.

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