In case you’ve been living under a rock, everyone’s been complaining about outrageous power bills. Unfortunately, most of these bills do not even include the cold snap that plagued Alabama in January.
People are mad, and rightly so. Many people’s bills are double or triple what they normally are during the winter months. Without a whole home energy monitor (like this one) it makes it difficult to figure out where all the power is going. I too, was skeptical of what was going on and was surprised to find out the problem was not the power company or the HVAC.
After installing the whole home energy monitor, (Emporia Vue 2), I was surprised at the results. The culprit for the high power consumption was the electric water heater!
Our infrastructure is not set up the same way it is up north. Our water lines are buried generally about 18 in deep where they may be 3 to 4 ft deep in colder climates. This means when we get really hard freezes that are abnormal our water temperature gets extremely low. We measured the water temperature coming out of the tap and the water we were receiving was 33° during the cold snap.
Traditional tank water heaters are very inefficient because they have to keep water hot all the time even when you’re not using it. It’s having to raise the water temperature roughly 90° yet in the summer months it only has to work half as hard.
Below is a screenshot showing the energy usage for a day which does line up with the Alabama power usage unfortunately.
Solutions
Now that you know what the problem is how do you fix it? Well, electricity is a terribly expensive way to heat anything. Natural gas and propane are much cheaper to heat with but they do have a higher up front cost.
Furnace
You can have a gas furnace added to your HVAC system for more efficient heating. If you do this pay special attention to the venting requirements. 80% furnaces are cheap but require type b venting they can be difficult or impossible to install in an existing home.
A 90% furnace or higher is more expensive,but, will use PVC pipe for venting and is much easier and cheaper to install.
Tankless Water Heater
Tankless water heaters are great as long as you can turn the shower off without running out of hot water. The advantage, whether electric or gas , is you only heat water when you need it. Both options are great but gas will cost less to run in the long term.
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