Geek alert. May not be interesting to the casual reader. Technical, gadget-type stuff.<\/p>\n
We have had our current water heater for over 15 years (it came with the house). It’s inefficient and I’m concerned that it is ready to cause another flood. So I updated to the latest technology.<\/p>\n
I got a GE Geospring <\/a>water heater. It has a conventional electrical resistance water heater combined with a heat pump. Heat pumps are much more efficient — it uses less than half the electricity to heat water using the heat pump alone. However, a heat pump is slower, so the resistive part helps when demand is higher. There’s a nice animation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the negative side it was about 3 times as expensive as a conventional electric water heater, but the savings in electricity should pay for the difference in about 3 years. So it’s really an investment.<\/p>\n On the plus side, the heat pump extracts heat from the environment to heat the water, so it will actually help to cool the garage (a little). A nice benefit in the summer, but not so useful right now while the outside temperature is in the 30s, and supposed to drop into the 20s tonight.<\/p>\n Took me most of the day to install. I’m OK at sweating (soldering) copper pipes, but it took me a while to figure out that one of the pipes had water dripping into it, and it’s almost impossible to solder a wet pipe.<\/p>\n Now, don’t you non-techy types wish you had observed the warning at the top? Is there anything much more boring than a water heater?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Geek alert. May not be interesting to the casual reader. Technical, gadget-type stuff. We have had our current water heater for over 15 years (it came with the house). It’s inefficient and I’m concerned that it is ready to cause another flood. So I updated to the latest technology. I got a GE Geospring water […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-family-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}