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- cross-posted to:
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Meme: Sad Pablo Escobar meme moping around
Caption: Me waiting for the hot water to reach the sink every morning
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If you have access to your water heater and some basic tools, a recirculation pump and a smart plug can be life changing.
For about $250 (pump plus smart plug) and an hour or so of your time, you can create a one-way loop that will refresh the water in the pipes and return the cold water to the water heater.
The loop is best located at the place in the house where it takes the longest to get hot water.
You’ll have to “suffer” warm water in your cold tap, but using the smart timer to run only the time it takes to warm the water can limit that.
Gotta mention the downsides. You’re gonna pay more for electrical/gas. Since you’re basically keeping your hot pipes full of hot water at all times. If you’re in an older house and those pipes are copper and in a crawlspace, exposed to 40 degree weather, that’s gonna get cold pretty quick.
If you end up with access to old pipes I recommend a good insulation for starters. I insulated my own and my heat up time dropped from like 2 minutes to 30 seconds. Still quite a bit of time to wait but I’d be spending a lot on constantly keeping that longer pipe full with hot water
Absolutely insulate too! It’s really cheap and easy (if you have exposed pipes in places). Heck, I insulate my cold water in my attic because it’s otherwise a naked run in my attic and that sucks in the summer.
My CA weather privilege is showing (that said, energy and water are crazy expensive here too). You’re making me recall all the hell I went through trying to modernize the 1922 house in MN 15 years ago.
I do wonder how much difference it really makes in energy since we’d be evacuating at least as much water from the tank that it would have to heat fresh anyway. We use the smart plug to set things up for time of use: 7am for showers, 11:30 for lunch, 6pm for dinner, etc. That way we can avoid a constant energy suck. I set things up for a 1-click run for the in between times too.
Cool! I’m good with the way it is now since I’m used to it. It’s not a big deal. I know it wasn’t for me specifically, but I appreciate the recommendation.
I didn’t know that was a thing! I’ve been thinking of that exact same thing for years, wondering if it was even technically feasible and wondering why it wasn’t a standard in new home construction. I can’t imagine how much water is wasted by people just waiting for their showers to heat up.
Then again, my local water company recycles waste water from people’s homes. So maybe requiring it isn’t necessary with modern water recycling programs.
It’s a game changer. My smart plug lost its connection while I was messing with my router one day. I had forgotten how bad it was without the pump. I’m in a warm climate so the heat gets paid for twice but I don’t even care, it’s a luxury I am willing to pay for.
Is it weird with your cold water? Looking into it, it seems like it fills up your come water pipe with warm water. Wondering if that affects drinking water coming from your refrigerator or anything like that.
Fridge water is unaffected. The last sinks where the valves are located are lukewarm for 5 seconds or so. The rest of the sinks are normal for me. I have 2 branches so 2 valves.
If your water heater is old (10+ years) and/or in bad shape, it can be full of deposits and in some cases corrosion. Apparently we’re all supposed to be bleeding a few gallons from our water heaters monthly to maintain them. I don’t know anyone who does.
Our water from the city is total crap (and also the most expensive I’ve had in my life), so we added a softener and then split all the drinking/cooking water sources off to a RO system. But I’m also the guy with infinite sparkling water on tap from the kegerator in my kitchen (again only a few hundred in equipment and then about $80/yr in CO2, most of which I had from my home brewing hobby anyway).
That’s my kitchen sink. Takes forever to get hot water but the bathroom (Which is further from the tank) takes half the time.
The joys of an old house.
Same here but I’m in apartments that are less than 10 years old. So it’s not just old houses. Also poorly built apartments.
It has to run out of all the water that was sitting still between the output hole and the input source where it’s heated. If your apartment has a central water tank, that has its advantages - e.g. a whole family inside your place could take successive showers without ever running out of hot water - but this is the primary disadvantage to that, the wait to go through that cold water, which gets worse the further/higher up you are away from it.
Maybe try to find a way to not entirely waste it - like put some of that into a water kettle to be boiled for a hot drink? I enjoy such thoughts but do as you please ofc.
I am no plumber, just thought this might be interesting to know:-). I am 10,001% certain that someone will correct me here if I have said anything inaccurate. 😂
You’re correct, but I just want to point out that it isn’t advisable to drink or cook with water that comes from your hot water tank. Hot water can (and usually will) corrode metal parts from your tank and plumbing and can be contaminated by all sorts of nasty stuff that won’t go away even if you boil the water first.
https://www.denverwater.org/tap/psa-dont-drink-or-cook-with-hot-water-from-the-tap?size=n_21_n
If you look it up on youtube, you can see for yourself the insane amount of crap that builds up inside a hot water tank over time. https://youtu.be/kAzKts6Wp1Q?si=UMPzHcIoSRdSgJ4g&t=88
Oh wow, gross, but therefore thanks for sharing!:-)
Man, even if you boil the water… that sounds no bueno… People act like humans live “better” lives than those from 100 years ago, as if well water wasn’t fresher and cleaner than what crap we get out of our tap. Tbf, vaccines exist now and that’s HUGE (well… for those that choose to take them), but in other ways we’ve gone backwards or at least sidewise rather than forward.
To be fair a lot of wells didn’t/don’t have good water either but we were not very good at testing or noticing that kind of thing until people started dropping.
It might be information overload but like… it seems hard to imagine people finding out that their wells were bad to drink from, and then simply deciding not to care. Though, that’s probably naive and it’s likely always been this way.
Why does that happen? Is the pipe to the bathroom wider than the kitchen sink?
In my case it’s because the last several owners of this house were idiots that cheaped out on everything and thought they knew better than the professionals do… my plumbing is a wonderful variety of crap soldered to different crap that I think was partially salvaged from the Titanic or something.
And since I’m renting, I have no ambition to rip anything out and fix it properly unless it breaks.
My kitchen is fairly far from my water heater, which is very close to every other hot water tap in my house. So when washing dishes I often have to run the tap to get hot water in the kitchen. In summer I run this water into my watering can for my garden. In winter I collect it in a jug and pour it into my clothes washer.
Same. Water heater is on the opposite side of the house from the kitchen sink. I have to run the sink for several minutes just to run the dishwasher, which is annoying as hell. I hate how much water have to waste just for the dishwasher to get hot enough to clean effectively.
You can fix the issue by installing a pump on your water heater, but that’s a project that I’m saving for when I need a new one in a few years.
Which is why I just time it so that I fill my watering can just before I need hot water.
Wait what ? I thought the vast majority of dishwashers had internal heating to avoid exactly these kind of issues
This depends on where you live in. AFAIK, in Europe dishwashers are not even hooked up to hot water, just cold. In America their standard plug electricity is weaker and therefore it’s not enough for a dishwasher to heat the water hot enough to sanaitze.
This is the reason electric kettles are not a big thing in America (they take significantly longer to heat the water) and “home electrification” is a bigger deal there.
And as always, to anyone interested, Technology Connections talks about this in his videos on dishwashers, induction stovetops and kettles.
Ah yes, thank you, it was indeed some American problem I was too European to understand
They do but if you want to actually sanitize your dishes, the heater alone isn’t going to cut it.
Dorms I live in rn get hot water within like 2 seconds I come from the country and fast hot water is fucking beautiful.
That would be because of the recirculation line constantly flowing fresh hot water through the loop so it never gets stale/cold even if nobody uses it all day. Bit impractical for domestic uses, but it is an amazing commodity.
Apartments with central water heating do exist, and it’s pretty cool.
If you have the money, the most efficient way to solve this is to install an on-demand tankless water heater at every single outlet that has hot water (e.g., not the toilets). The downside is that this is a very expensive way to solve the problem; not only do you need to buy the water heaters, you need to run new electrical to every single one (or new gas lines, which would be even more expensive). The upside is that you get hot water as fast as a recirculating pump, but without the cost of constantly running a pump and your water heater.
Many years ago I lived in an apartment in San Diego that had recirculating hot water (there was no water heater in my apartment); I guess the apartment complex figured that the cost of constantly heating the water was cheaper than the cost of the water that they would otherwise lose down the sewer while people were waiting for the water to heat up in their apartment.
Recirculating pumps dont have to run constantly. Usually they are on a timer for when you most often need hot water, and the pumps arent that power hungry. For a couple hundred bucks a typical house can have one installed.
You have three issues - yeah, the pump doesn’t use that much power, but it does use power. If you’re trying to reduce electricity consumption to the bare minimum, a tankless water heater right at the tap will be slightly more efficient. It doesn’t have to always run, but for people that don’t have predictable schedules, that can result in my wasted water. And your water heater is going to have to run more, because even with insulated pipes, you’ll be losing some heat as the water circulates.
It is absolutely better than running the taps wide open until you get hot water, especially if you live in a place with limited water availability. I wouldn’t use my solution for anything other than new construction due to the cost of running so much new wiring.
Thank you for the info, I had no idea this existed. I’m going to install one when I redo my kitchen! It’s so wasteful to have to wait 15s for hot water…
I have to wait 90 seconds for the hot water to arrive at my kitchen sink. The house is on a slab foundation, so I have no clue how the pipes are routed, but my guess is the zig-zagged them all around the foundation just for the fun of it.
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My kitchen sink is next to the water heater. It’s hot in 5 seconds. My shower is on the opposite end of the house. I’d reckon it’s a 2 minute wait. Sometimes, I turn the bathroom sink on and get undressed.
Yep! When I want to shower, I run the hot water in the sink at the same time. It speeds it up by almost half.
It’s literally the opposite in my place. The cold spigot will release 90F water when it’s 60F outside. The hot spigot is even hotter.
Same here. Not only takes forever to get warm, takes another minute or 2 to steam. Then my bathroom sink is fine, also farther away from the hot water heater. This is in apartments that were built less than 10 years ago. Part of me thinks it could be the valve or pipe type or something.
