hot water

[kirkcudbright]

We've been without heat or (more importantly) hot water since yesterday morning. We have oil heat with an indirect water heater - the boiler provides a heating loop into the water storage tank. The overall problem is that there's no water in the boiler. This is the result of 2 actionable problems: 1) the feeder valve is broken, so no water is

Comments

[kirkcudbright]

Hm, we're not green enough to collect not-yet-hot water. OTOH, while they were working on the water mains last night, we carried in buckets from the rain barrel to flush the toilets.

[pywaket]

A lot of commercial installations use drain heat recovery systems to preheat the water using the waste heat. It might make an instantaneous electric heater more feasible for you.

http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/drain-water-heat-recovery

http://www.renewability.com/power_pipe/index.html

Agent Orange is even selling them now: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Power-Pipe-2-in-x-60-in-Drain-Water-Heat-Recovery-Unit-R2-60/203455947

Payback time is estimated at 2-10 years by Environment Canada. They're apparently quite popular up there.

[pywaket]

Oops, sorry, I meant that for Paul.

We have a gas tankless here at Andor as well. It works really well.

BTW, I've seen systems where there's a separate valve to allow you to effectively "turn on" the hot water, but it just feeds the water back into the cold supply. It allows you to run the water to get it hot without wasting any. It's fairly easy to plumb, just requiring a return line, an anti-backflow valve and a valve to turn the system on.