The wife doesn't like the house being set at 55 degrees so she (and the teen) take long showers, only leaving the bathroom when the 50 gallon hotwater tank runs cold.
My propane hotwater heater is set to something like 135 degrees. That means a lot of hot water is going down the drain.
I wonder - is there a calculation done on how much energy it takes to heat 50 gallons of water with propane versus how much energy it takes to heat a house by 5 degrees with propane?
The heat capacity of water is four times that of air. That's on a weight basis and air is 784 times less dense than water. You could do a rough calculation on this basis. You'd need the volume of air in your house to make the comparison.
If your furnace is a 90 percenter, most likely cheaper to use the furnace. Most WH are about 70% efficient.
From here, the big expense is the 50 plus gal of warm water that go down the drain.
As to the WH, it takes one BTU to raise one pound of water one degree F. So, you can measure the temp of cold, temp of hot, and get the temp rise the WH provides.
You can run the furnace some morning, see how long it runs to warm up the house. Look at the BTUH rating of the furnace.
Whoa! Water temp. is at 135 deg and indoor temp. at 55 deg.? If I keep temp. like that I'd have revolt from all member of my family. That is barely ~14.5C. If OP has to keep it that way how about changing shower head to water saving type? Any one in the family catching cold? 135 deg. is lower than that of some hot springs in the Rockies.
According to the West Midlands Public Health Observatory an adequate level of wintertime warmth is 21 °C (70 °F) for a living room, and a minimum of 18 °C (64 °F) for other occupied rooms, giving 24 °C (75 °F) as a maximum comfortable room temperature for sedentary adults. At temperatures below 20 °C (68 °F), increased risk of death has been observed, and winter deaths reportedly rise at a rate of about 1.4% per degree below 18 °C (64 °F).
Why the wife doesn't just turn up the thermostat is a mystery.
Yeah, I don't have to do the math. Most of the heat put in the water leaves by way of the drain.
So, is it you trying to force your family to live at 55? That's just cruel.
Eskimo Igloo may be warmer than 55 deg., LOL! Our thermostat is programmed at 20.5C and 18.0C. When we're away on vacation, at 14.5C all the time in winter, 23.5C in summer. Any how I can remotely adjust the settings any time any where if there is Internet access.
got my gas bill today 70.95 for the month it runs around 25 dollars for non heating months. So 45 bucks to keep from freezing for a month, that's a pretty good deal, keep on fracking.
55 feels nice when you're outside, even without much sunlight, but somehow anything short of 66 or 68 feels cold inside.
It might be. Or she could take a shower in a bathtub with a closed drain. For one thing you could see how many gallons it really is (because it might be less than 50, since cold water mixes with the hot water in the WH and the mixture is probably too cold to shower with before the entire 50 gallons are used.)
Then when she got out, all the heat in the water in the tub woudl eventually be released into the house. When the water was cold, you could drain it out. (This allows more dirt to settle out of the water onto the tub, but if your wife is pretty clean, that might not be much. )
More importantly, it puts more humidity into the house that will make it feel 4, 6, maybe 8 degrees warmer (let me know). When my furnace has been broken, or when the LL gave no heat, I boil water on the stove. A big pot that will hold a basketball takes 3 or 4 hours to evaporate, and has a greater warming effect, and one that fills the whole house, than just running the stove burner without the pot of water does, and more than a room heater does, certainly in the same length of time but in more time too.
Everytime I say this, people here talk about damage from water running down the inside of the windows, but water like that almost never happens and no damage has happened, and in my case it woudl be easy to paint the window sills. But mostly insulated windows are not that cold.
I usually take a bath every day, and when I'm thinking about it, the amount of now-warm water going down the drain bothers me.
Our bill includes power, gas, water(tap water, sewer service), garbage pick up(waste, recyclable), snow removal on the walking path in the park. ~400.00 CAD in the winter. Your gas pump price is lower than ours. Right now 1.25 CAD/Litre for 91 Octane gasoline which my car needs. There are two known cases of minor quakes due to fracking, one in Northern B.C., one in Northern Alberta. Fracking co, is hurting too because of low price of oil...
Wow. I'll have to watch myself to see if I can discern my risk of deaht.
Cause and effect. Maybe the ones about to die are too weak to turn the heat up?
I've had furnace problems over the years, and I now keep 2 thermomoters next to the bed. When it's below 60 it's hard to get out of bed, even to go push the Reset button on the furnace.
I've always preferred baths over showers. I always let the bath water in the tub (during the heating season), until it's cold. Then I drain it. If I leave the bathroom door shut with a tub full of hot water, the bathroom is 10 to 20 deg warmer than the rest of the house.
I notice my furnace running less often too when there is hot water in the tub. That hot water acts like a radiator. Why let it go down the drain?
It might take a few seconds more, and an extra squirt of tub cleaner, to clean the tub. No biggie!!! That saved heat is more valuable!
By the way, if you have some wet and slightly dirty gloves or socks from shoveling snow, I toss them in the tub after I finish bathing, swish them around, wring them with my hands and place them above a heat register to dry. You dont need to waste energy to run a washing machine and dryer just for some gloves/socks, and the gloves/socks by the register or radiator add some humidity to the house too.
The only reason is the dirt that settles out. Oh, and once I left the tub water dripping and it almost overflowed the tub!
I'm still using the bathtub brush my mother bought from me when I was a Fuller Brush Man, in 1964. It's like a toilet bowl brush, with twisted wire holding the bristles, just in a different shape. Triangular, instead of round. Most of the bristles that face out have been smashed down and run sideways now, but I tried to twist the hole wire so the interior bristles would face out again, the wire was too tough to do it the way I tried. Maybe I'll use a vice.
But tonilght because of this thread, I thought I'd look for a replacement brush. If the first one lasted 51 years, I'll have to live to 120 to get 51 years out of the second one. But they don't seem to sell one like the one I have, anymore. Darn. They have long handles, like mops, or other differences.
Good idea.
I put a diverter in my dryer output, so that I send the hot air outside during the summer and inside during the winter.
Of course the dryer is broken now and I've been drying all my laundry on the shower bar. I've been avoiding washing towels, because they'll drip all the way upstairs.
Not about wetness, but when I was little, my mother would take my coat out of the closet, which was surprisingly cold, and put it over the hot air vent so it would be warm when I went to school.
How poor are you that you can only afford to keep your house at 55 F? There's no way in hell I'd subject my family to that unless financially I had no choice - and I'm a tightass.
I keep our house at 58 F at night, 62 F during the day - but I allow an override up to 65 F if anyone's at home.
If you're not doing this out of financial desperation, then your family is entitled to do whatever the hell they need to do to beat you at your skinflint game.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.