How to Install a Heat Pump Water Heater / Water Heater Installation

this video we're going to replace an old inefficient gas water heater with a brand new energy efficient heat pump water heater it's going to be a good video If you're looking to do this yourself and save some money it's going to be a good video check it out first thing I got to do though is drain this tank I got to shut the gas off shut the water off so let's get going all right we're going to shut the furnace off going shut you off there you are man is on there we go so I'm using the pipe Branch to break that guy loose like there's a reducer up there I might try to get that guy out of there too so what we're looking at here we have 3/4 in pipe and then we have a/ inch reducer and then that 1/ in pipe fed the gas hot water heater so I'm getting rid of that reducer and then I just placed a 3/4 in nipple in place so if I wanted to go back to gas at some point it should be easy to do so all right few handy tools that I've used throughout this job and I'll put a link to it as an affiliate I would make a small commission but if you're cutting copper pipe this little guy is super useful just wrap it around the pipe and spin it and it makes a nice accurate cut and after that we're going to get rid of that chimney and then we're going to cap it and then we're going to get ready to get rid of that old hot water heater so the main reason I wanted to get rid of this old hot water heater is the way it vents I would be okay with a gas hot water heater that has an electric vent the fan would turn on and it would blow out the exhaust um harmlessly outside the way this works is that we're relying on the warm air to go up this chimney and then up my main chimney and then harmlessly out through the roof and uh I recently had an energy audit done of my house and there it looks like there's I'll show a close-up of it but it looks like at times I have some backdrafting so something happens during the year either it's maybe really cold outside or maybe it's really cold down here in the summer and it's not drafting properly but something's going on so I wanted to get rid of this as soon as possible that's what led me to this guy it doesn't use gas so we're not producing carbon monoxide also it works as a refrigerator in Reverse we're taking heat from the basement and we're transferring it to the hot water heater so in the winter it's going to be a little cooler down here but this is going to be great in the summer it's going to be warm and humid in the summer so I'm going to take this that free warm air and transfer it to the water in the tank also another benefit of these things is that it it's a dehumidifier as well so in my basement in the summer it gets pretty humid down here especially in the spring if I'm not running the air conditioner so this is going to going to help dehumidify the basement this way it's pretty good maybe uh oh yeah we'll just fill in some voids so we need a dialectric union a dialectric Union just means that it's a fitting for two different types of metal we have the steel from the hot water tank and we're going to attach it to copper and if they were touching they would corrode so the for these male fittings here you see my go-to method is I use uh two to three wraps of that tape and then I put some pipe dope on there as well and that's done me fairly well for preventing leaks so the pieces I'm installing here these are from the package for that dialectric Union and it's a soldering package so I have to solder these pieces together and I do that before I attach it to the hot water heater otherwise I run the risk of hurting that hot water heater with heat so once everything's cooled off you see that rubber gasket Bridges the gap between the two metals so they're not actually touching and they're not going to corrode so I tighten that nut down and then start connecting it to the other pipe center has all these different shark bite fittings and crazy fittings so you don't have to solder but I'll say this if you have copper I would make the whole job copper if you have pecs I would do everything in pecs I wouldn't mix and match the two just because it's easy and don't be afraid of soldering it's really not that bad here's a brief little tutorial once we have the pipe cut to size it's time to clean it you can clean it with Emer cloth or there's a bunch of different tools you can buy to make the job easier so we have clean pipe we have the coupling clean as time to apply flux I put flux on the pipe and I'll put a fine layer on the coupling as well and then time to heat so for a vertical joint like this I'll do the bottom first and I'll typically do two swipes of the solder Pros will just do one I guess I'm nervous that it's going to leak and then once the Bottom's done then I'll move up to the top it's important just to heat one side of the coupling you don't want to move the heat all around I've done that in the past and it doesn't really matter the easiest thing to do is just heat one spot and then apply the solder once the pipe's cooled off off we can wipe it down and it looks pretty good for a novice it's one of these things it's like 10 minutes to learn but a lifetime to master especially if you're not a plumber and another thing to make your life easy is to use tinning flux I use the water soluble flux but the tinning flux actually has solder in it and that that helps prevent leaks so you see here we're working off that stub out from that dialectric Union and we're just going to keep put piecing pipe together until we connect it to the existing Plumbing to make make your life easier in the future it's a good idea to install some shut off valves this way we don't have to shut water off for the whole house if we have to service this thing we can just do it right next to the hot water heater and to install these pipes nice and level I'll show you how I found level well of course I used the level I held it up to where the existing Plumbing was and then I measured down to my fitting then it was from there it was easy to cut and fit the piece together and after we're all set and done came out pretty good all right we continue to Boogie along I'm going to put my expansion tank here to get everything nice and level and straight it was easier for me to install the pipes first and then cut it where I wanted the expansion tank fitting then solder it all together you know like that I was able to install part of that fitting but a slow leak was building up into that t fitting and I couldn't solder that pipe I couldn't get that pipe hot enough cuz of the water so an old trick is to take a little bit of bread and stick it into the fitting there that bread will absorb the water and then that fitting can get hot enough where I can solder it together and then once everything's said and done I was able to use some pliers to pluck that bread out of there but really you should be able to turn the water on and the bread should dissolve so I finished sweating everything together and now it's time to install that expansion tank and again a couple wraps of that plumber tape and then some pipe dope and that's really a good method uh to prevent leaks I learned that from an old plumber and I've just been following suit and again it's been doing great for me so I cinched this thing down now it's time for electrical electrical requirements are spelled out in the installation instructions it required a double pull 30 amp breaker so I ran 10 gauge wire from my panel down this conduit here to this junction box and from that junction box I'm going to use a whip to go from the box to the Appliance so I made sure I installed everything right I secured everything into the block wall with tapcons and that's how it looks so you see here I'm making a whip I happen to have conduit it laying around and the electrician that helped me he had some t engage wire so I use that but you can buy a whip for something like this at Home Depot or Low's and I like to I like to strip the wire a little long and you'll see why here in a minute once the wire is stripped I twist them together and then I cut it so it's maybe a quar inch long and then I finish everything off with a nice wire cap so you see it's nice and cut so I twisted everything cut off the excess then capped it and that's pretty good practice electrician improved I'm going to do the same thing on the hot water tank I'm going to strip those wires so they're a little bit longer I can twist them together and finish it off with a cap and there's a grounding screw and that was kind of hard to get the the ground wire in there but after some doing I was able to get a nice secure fitting and then I just put everything back together and we're looking to be in good shape okay so I think we're installed my family's home so if you hear yelling and screaming they're hungry they're upstairs but uh the directions say to turn the cold water supply on this is going to fill up these are open to bleed so I don't have to run upstairs and open up all the faucets so um let's see if there's any leaks and then after that then we turn on the power so so those two open ball valves up there you see those are extremely helpful for something like this and actually that cold water one that I left on yeah I didn't need that on but the other one the other one is the hot water leaving the tank that was very helpful so water was entering the tank and all the air in the tank has to go somewhere and we're bleeding that air out of that ball valve up there otherwise I would have to turn a bunch of faucets on upstairs uh to bleed all that air out all right so we've had this guy installed for about 3 weeks let's talk about how it's working so typically we have three kids shower back to back with our old gas hot water heater and it would do a pretty good job of regenerating this maybe does uh a little lesser job regenerating hot water two kids can shower back to back with no big deal and then we got to wait about 15 minutes for the third person to take a shower so it's really not that big of a deal um as far as how it's operating I don't know if you could hear but the fan running now if I had to listen to this on the main level I don't think I'd really like it uh it's a little less quiet than the furnace running so the fact that this is running in the basement I really don't notice it when I'm upstairs now let's take a closer look to see how this thing works all right so we can toggle we can raise the temperature of the hot water heater with just these buttons here I had mine set at 125 that was a little too cool but uh I set mine right at 128 so the efficiency setting uh this hot water heater will run only with the heat pump so it'd be good for maybe one or two people it won't regenerate as fast but you'll get your your biggest bang for the buck as far as Energy Efficiency hybrid this is the mode that I run it in it uses the heat pump like it's doing now but during periods of high water use it kick on the electrical heat elements um and then there's another setting for electric so if we put it in electrical mode here the hot water heater will run as if it's an electric hot water heater it will not use the heat pump so this would be a good thing to use if maybe you have uh gas over and you're going to have a lot of hot water usage and you don't want any delays so you could put it in electric setting and that'll last for 48 hours then it'll go back to hybrid hey if you're still watching I really appreciate it I don't ask all the time but if this video has been helpful to you hopefully you won't mind liking and subscribing it helps my channel out a lot now let's talk about some of the economics involved and buy an appliance like this so I'll show you the cost of a direct vent hot water heater versus the heat pump water heater the heat pump is more expensive however the federal government and the local Energy company is offering rebates toward the purchase of one of these you get almost $3,000 in rebates to install one now I have heard some concerns with the longevity of these things so if I have any issues I'll be sure to report back thanks again for watching

Channel: The Dusty Builder

Views: 6,916

Keywords: green hot water heater, energy efficient hot water heater, water heater, how to install a water heater, heat pump, heatpump

Id: MUGaC890lJ8

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024