Ok so there are free energy geniuses here. I have a simple one:
You know that when electric water heaters are new, they're almost perfectly silent. As they age, they start popping, fizzling, and making all sorts of strange sounds. Also, they don't seem to deliver as much hot water and take longer to heat up what they do produce. Why?
Well I hate to wreck the white board with all the algebra on it, but water is one of those pesky materials that doesn't quite follow the rules. It does things like superheat, flash boil, dissolve all kinds of other materials, and tends to catalyze corrosion. Flash boiling and condensing wastes all kinds of energy compared to zero. All of these factors mentioned consume energy and change all the algebra a little bit each.
As mentioned before, the element itself is not 100 percent efficient. In a test lab, the unit is connected to instruments at the wires sticking out. In a home, there is always more wire running to the source. If you are lucky, there is just one set of wire nuts on one end of one wire run. Most homes have more terminals and breaks between the unit and the source. Vampire losses all add up.
Most heating elements are designed to shed the lime that builds up on them and this fills the bottom of the tank with lime sand. If the sand isn't purged, it conglomerates and forms rocks and slabs of sediment. Needless to say this reduces the capacity and efficiency of the tank significantly. Heating rocks doesn't count as heating water. Yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda eventually the poor element burns out, increasing cost of ownership.
|