Most Efficient Water Heater You Can Buy

i'm jake bruton with arrow building and today on the build show network i'm going to talk to you about an air source heat pump that isn't running my hvac system so before we get to the surprise of what that outdoor unit is doing i want to give you a hint by talking about water heating and i want to talk about water heating in the sense of residential in the united states i think that it's one of the things that we think about as a consumer as a homeowner and even as a builder or a plumber sometime as it's just [Music] it's no different than a garbage disposal it does what it does if we want to spend a little bit more money we can get one that's quieter or a little bit more efficient but no one's special orders at garbage disposal you go to the store and you buy what they have and that's what you install and the same thing happens for water heating in the united states which is kind of weird when you think about we don't just buy the windows off the shelf most of the time we don't just buy the siding off the shelf we don't just buy whatever they have in stock or look at the two things that that the box store has and then go okay well that one's more bang for our buck or hey we're gonna save a little bit of money let's buy that one we don't treat a lot of the things inside of our house that way so why do we treat heating water that way i'm not sure i think that we choose to view it as a first cost only item meaning when it comes to talking about how we're going to heat the water inside of our house the conversation starts with what does the unit cost that's it not what is the operating cost what is the installation cost what is the long-term durability if you've ever noticed uh especially in a rental property the water heater will have a date hand written on it by whoever installed it that's because that thing is a time bomb and i don't mean bomb in the sense of a bomb i mean that thing it has a limited life span and we just acknowledge that when we install a new one we would never just accept that from any other devices we would never buy a stove and write the installation date on the back of it so that we can know hey this thing's about dead but for some reason we accept that when it comes to heating water in the united states so let's talk about the traditional methods that we're using to heat water for the purpose of our conversation we're going to kind of just set aside solar hot water and just say it's very expensive it's not widespread and we haven't we haven't encountered it yet in a way that we thought was a good value for the client so we'll just push that aside for the moment we're going to talk today about gas and electric so if you have a gas water heater you have a heating element that pokes into the tank of the water that's effectively the same thing as your toaster the heating element gets really hot it causes the water around it to get hot and then that water can be piped to where you want it if you have a gas water heater you have a heating element below the tank it heats the tank the same as a pot of water on the stove and then that water can be piped wherever you want it and when we're talking about efficiency ratings setting aside the does measure we'll just talk about percentages because that system to me makes more sense electric heating that that resistance heating that we were talking about if you put a dollar's worth of electricity into resistance heating you get 80 to 90 of that uh energy back uh meaning that you're gonna get eight eight eighty cents worth of hot water out of that tank uh gas can be substantially higher i think i've seen some gas water heaters as high as like um 99 but that unit is still not going to be returning more value in hot water than what you put into it now when we talk about electric we also can then add on uh heat pump air source heat pump so it's the exact same thing that your refrigerator does in reverse it compresses a gas it lets it go it steals the steals the thermal energy off of it and dumps it into the hot water or dumps it into the water to make it hot those systems can be in the 200 percent range so meaning you put one dollar in you get two dollars worth of uh heated water back and then the third uh or the the other way that we traditionally see hot water nowadays in the united states that a lot of people are on the bandwagon with is tankless now it still takes the same amount of btus to heat each liter of water or each measure of water the difference that gives tankless a higher efficiency is that it's not keeping any water warm throughout the day so it has no tank loss so it heats the water as it goes through a small line assembly and on to you and we're not heating any water that we're not going to use right now that's great for efficiency standpoints but don't be tricked into thinking that it's a more efficient way of heating water it's just a more efficient way of handling that hot water so i think we should look at it that way and those systems have some downsides just like any other uh the the regularly scheduled maintenance on those can be a little bit of a challenge for some homeowners whereas like an electric resistance heater is uh set it and forget it you know we're not going to touch that unit so we're here at our spring valley house i'm sure that you recognize this house by now and uh this house is combustion free the reason this house is combustion free is we believe that electricity will become cheaper as solar and renewables become more popular this house is set up so that a couple years after occupancy we have the load calculations and we will have solar here so this this house should be net zero by that time and when it comes to indoor air quality concerns burning fossil fuels inside the house is probably not the best idea doesn't mean that it's exactly dangerous it's just you know we weren't going to have a cook top and a hood because just because the cooktop is turned on doesn't mean the hood's turned on doesn't mean that you're getting rid of the nasty things that are generated by that unit we don't want things like a cooktop anymore we're driving our clients towards a combustion free house we believe that the future is combustion free so that leads you to that that eliminates a gas water heater and an on-demand gas water heater that leads you to probably in a house with r40 walls r9 windows and r60 insulation in the attic uh a heat pump water heater well there are some downsides to a heat pump water heater on a house like this first of all this house has very low air leakage numbers 0.3 ach 50 and for us to have those air leakage numbers and a heat pump water heater indoors that unit is constantly putting off cold air well part of the year that's a bonus we get free air conditioning from that i mean obviously not free but we get a side benefit of air conditioning but in climate zone four we are predominantly heating sometimes it seems counterintuitive but we have more heating degree days than we have cooling that means that now we're battling our hot water heater because we have a heat pump water heater so that's a downside that's the first downside to a heat pump water heater the second downside is it doesn't just fit in a small space it has to be thermally connected to 700 square feet or roughly there's some different rules for different units so if i have a water heater that needs 700 square feet of space actually i think it might be 700 cubic square or cubic feet of space that's a large volume so it either has to be in a big room which nobody's doing or that room has to be ducted or a vented door or something like that to allow it to share volume it needs enough area to steal heat from in other words well that means that that duct work that open door that vented door are going to allow the noise from that water heater into the rest of the house so in a house with 10 inch thick walls heavy duty windows and a great air sealing package we have a very quiet assembly so all those little noises that that water heater might make can be a real irritating problem for clients therefore we had to look for a different solution now the uh that the heat pump is probably the most efficient or not probably is the most efficient device that we can use for heating water but we don't want it inside so we found the sandin co2 uh heat pump water heater it comes with the outdoor uh it's a mini split technology so it comes with the outdoor heating element that is an air source heat pump now it's coupled to all of that air outside so we don't have any cubic air requirements we just have a little bit of like clearance so it's able to steal heat from everything outside and then we have a stainless steel tank on the indoor unit meaning that indoor unit is probably not ever going to have that same i exploded and flooded your house with water that some water heaters in the united states have been notorious for over the years we have a high quality tank on the inside and we have a hybrid heat pump on the outside so it's a very interesting technology all of our water heating happens outside which means we do have water lines on the outside of the house we have to handle that we have to plan for that and we have to run a heat tape on those units so the water goes from our city from our municipality into the hot water heater on the cold side back out on the bottom and to our unit outdoors as a cold and then it circulates back up to the hot side of our tank and then the reason that all that happens is the unit actually gets a higher efficiency rating operating at a higher temperature so the unit outdoors is actually heating the water to 170 degrees or it's capable of going to 170 degrees and when you have a unit that's putting out 170 degree water you're not plumbing that to your devices so it mixes with the cold to uh handle what we have going on so that's why it has that that in and out feature that most water heaters don't have so we have our heat tape on our outdoor water lines to keep them from freezing the unit outdoors is rated to negative 20 degrees we don't see negative 20 degree temperatures that rating shows that that unit will still find heat in the air to steal and heat your water all the way down to negative 20 degrees seems counter-intuitive but science is a wonderful thing another benefit of that unit it does not use the r134a refrigerant that's bad for the environment when it leaks off like a regular uh or like a common outdoor air conditioner it uses co2 well co2 is a natural occurring element it just has to be harvested and then put into the system and if we have a system leak co2 has a global warming potential number of one it's really not bad for the environment because it is part of the environment naturally it also is the secret to their uh success with the uh their compressor and their efficiency rating so when we talked earlier about some heat pump water heaters get us to the 200 percent rating the sandin can get up to the 500 uh and i believe that's at 67 degrees so you put a dollar in and you get five dollars worth of hot water back out that is a heck of a cost savings next we have no noise the only noise we have is a little bit of water running through the lines and in and out of the tank so in a quiet house like this we don't have a problem with noise in fact the hot water heater here upstairs adjoins the master bedroom it's in the next room to the master bedroom and it's about six inches from that master bedroom wall we wouldn't dare think of doing that with a gas or heat pump water heater traditional heat pump water heater another really interesting thing about this system is now well sorry let's back up that means i can put a closet door on it because no heating is actually taking place in that room so that traditional closet like you'd see in a 50s ranch that's six feet wide with the five foot door on it that houses my water heater and my erv for this house another interesting thing because the unit uses such little energy it's on a 15 amp breaker now it's a 230 but it is a 15 amp breaker talk about counter-intuitive the idea that you could have hot water from a 15 amp breaker and it be energy efficient the whole system is designed for us to rethink as a society how we heat water the the systems have been in japan for i think 20 years or maybe more uh the company sanding that makes the the compressor outdoors uh they make compressors for all sorts of industries and this just happens to be a like hey we have this technology where else can we use it for them originally but it makes a lot of sense and i think that while the unit is more expensive than a lot of the uh or or almost all of the traditional water heaters on the market in the united states the efficiency rating and the benefits and the flexibility that you have means a lot to the industry and i think that this could be a game changer i can imagine clients like we have sometimes that are far enough out that they don't have gas where you'd have to have propane delivered and yet electricity is very cheap like seven cents per kilowatt hour uh that this could be something that you would think about where yeah we would rather spend our money on electricity than on having propane delivered i also just think that it's a really interesting technology that i think is an industry we should work to support so i wanted to say thanks for watching today look into the sand and water heater uh they are really interesting and i and exciting and that's why i wanted to share this check us out every day of the week on the build show network we're putting out one video a day we have one day wade paquin brent hall steve basic matt reisinger they all have a day i'm really happy that they've asked me to be involved i think that that's a great group of guys to be involved with when it comes to building building science the business of what we do so thanks for watching i'm jake bruton don't forget to follow me on instagram that's the build show for today [Music]

Channel: Aarow Building

Views: 2,554

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Id: cIQA-obhpKo

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022