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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