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Water Heaters

A wide variety of water heaters use primarily gas or electricity to heat water for cleaning, washing, bathing, and showers. Electric resistance water heaters use metal coils like an electric coffee pot or stove top which heat surrounding water. Newer electric water heaters use heat pumps which gather heat from a source like the surrounding air, compress it and concentrate the heat in a transfer medium (“refrigerant”) so that it will heat water passing through a heat exchanger. Since heat pump water heaters gather heat from the environment, they can produce multiple units of heat from a single unit of electricity. An electric resistance water heater can produce no more than one unit of heat from one unit of electricity.

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Many water heaters store 40 to 120 gallons of hot water in a tank. But even with the best insulation around the tank, heat slowly transfers from the hot water (typically 135○F or hotter) to the air surrounding the tank (“standby heat loss”). Thus, some electric and gas water heaters heat water only as it is needed and are “tankless” or “instantaneous.” There is no standby heat loss because there is no tank.

Gas water heaters burn gas to heat the water much like a gas stove heats a pan of water. But these heaters vary greatly in efficiency from models where only 80 percent of the heat potential of the gas is transferred to the water to models where 98 percent of the energy in the gas heats the water. The latter are “condensing” water heaters because they take so much heat from the combustion gas that the water vapor in the gas will cool enough to condense into liquid water.

VENDORS

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION

Triangle Tube (Thanks to Jesse Thompson at Kaplan Thompson Architects.)

Eemax (Thanks to Gary Moshier at Moshier Studio.)

Colmac Waterheat

Eco Smart Water Heaters

Eemax

Glacier Opti-Stor

Laars

Mayekawa

Navien

Noritz

Rheem

Sanden

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