Quote:
Originally Posted by Daox
You seem to be an electronics wiz. Why not just replace it with a control system of your own design?
EcoRenovator is a place to develop solutions to issues. The industry very rarely makes things exactly how you want them. We find ways to fix things to our liking here.
That water heater may or may not be incredibly useful for the average wasteful US household. That .48 kWh may be saving hundreds per year. The aweful embedded electronics may work great for them. But, if it doesn't work for you go ahead and fix it. You obviously know how.
|
Well, 115-120F is pretty much the lower limit from practical sense so you have warm enough water for usage. Residential water heaters are designed for upper bound of 150F.
So, all that controller is designed to go move back and forth between 115F and upper set point set by the user and since people don't set it at 150F for safety reasons, you're talking about insignificant reduction in standing from going down 10-15F at the most, which I think is easily dwarfed by 0.45kWh/day loss at the control board. Unfortunately, this style is less flexible too.
So, the solution here is confessing to my mistake of buying that thing and I will be going back to the traditional style. The traditional style lets you do something like setting the upper element at 115F and lower at 130F and putting the timer just on lower element so that it works on time of use schedule, but the upper element will come on whenever if you use enough water such that upper element falls under 115F.
If you put a timer at the heater on the electronic board, it throws an error thinking the heating element is out.