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Saturday, January 12, 2013

Hot Water for Less?

As we work on making over my studio (chick cave) certain projects have happened as part of the whole domino effect of the massive culling and organizing.  One of those projects has been that the garage has gotten a whole lot less cluttered as furniture makes its way back into the studio. 
 
 
As we rearranged some shelves we had the unpleasant discovery of water leaking around our old hot water heater.  Ugh.  Thankful that it is only leaking and had not burst (we’ve been thru that before… NOT fun… ) we headed up to Lowes to check out the water heaters.
 
We’d pretty much decided we were going to get an 80 gallon tank… until we saw they were almost double the cost of a 50 gallon tank.  So much for that.
 
 
So we picked out an “Energy Smart” 50 gallon heater.  I couldn’t believe that almost $42 a month was considered good!  Wow… 
 
Then Himself spotted this label…
 
 
Only $16-ish a month??  Now it had my attention. 
 
It was a GE “GeoSpring Hybrid Electric Heat Pump Water Heater”.  But the $1200 price tag nearly caused me sit down right there with a good old-fashion case of the vapors.  Even tho it gave a savings of almost a third of the ‘energy saver’… it cost a lot more!   Ouch!
 
We put off buying it right then so we could talk about the pros and cons of it.  In the end, we decided that it was a long term investment and in two and a half years it should pay for the difference. 
 
So back we went to Lowes to make our purchase.  And we were thrilled to find out that in those few days it went on sale for $200 less… then add to that the 10% military discount Lowes gives every day… we were now looking at a $900 water heater that should pay for itself in a year and a half. 
 
 
We brought it home and it was installed yesterday morning.  Even tho it looks different, it installed like any electric hot water heater.  The red portion is the heat pump and the red and green tubes on the right are for condensation from the heat pump unit.  Kind of like a drip pan area on a refrigerator. 
 
 
It’s very interesting how it works.  It uses heat in the air around it as part of the heating of the water.  The energy rating was for the “hybrid” setting but it you have it on “heat pump” you’ll have even better savings.  The disadvantage to the heat pump setting is that it takes a bit longer to recharge.  Since there is just the two of us in our home, that shouldn’t be a problem.
 
I’m very interested in seeing how well it works.  There should be a substantial change immediately in our electric bill.  I’ll write up a review in a few months about how it’s working for us.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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