I this plan worth it?

hey no smoke, i dont know your situation too well but have you thought about installing a timer for your hot water tank? i havent personally done one at my house but i have done them for customers and they claim so save a decent chunk of change, (electric is pretty fair out here too .11kwh) so if you guys are pretty regimented, you could set up a timer for it to only run for a portion of the day, and cut in a over-ride switch, you would just have to remember that you would have to hit it an hr ahead of time.

I have not considered a timer because our schedules are not so predictable. I know we use hot water at peak times that tax the appliance so deeply that we run out of hot water, but that is a capacity issue and not the water heater itself. I am always home as I am on unemployment so that is a big problem and my main reason to keep the electric bill down...lack of money to pay for it, but my wife is a homemaker and about ready to have our fourth child, so a predictable schedule of having hot water is a huge issue. I know though, that I pay for that convenience of having hot water at the ready!

As for the boiler mate, you make some good points Rob. I guess I just assumed that having a boiler mate would be less expensive then having an electric hot water heater, basing my thoughts on the amazing difference my propane clothes dryer made versus my old electric clothes dryer. In that case, the propane dryer comes up to temperature so fast that it hardly uses any propane and gets the job done so much cheaper. In that case a BTU is a BTU whether it is electrically generated or propane generated, but in real world terms I noticed a big difference on my electric bill, but see no change in my propane bill. I just assumed that even with some stand by heat losses, I would notice a big change in my electric bill, but not in my propane consumption.

I know one area I could make a difference in, is in my coffee pot. I could not find a listing on it, but guess that it uses about 1500 watts. I get up early and drink a lot of coffee, so while I am looking at my hot water heater in disgust, in reality making a pot of coffee this morning at 03:00 when I got up, and keeping it on until 08:00 when I typically shut it off, uses far more then my hot water heater does in that time frame since I do not use any hot water in the morning and it is in stand by mode. If I was to make a pot of coffee, then shut my coffee pot off and pour the coffee into a thermos, I would actually save 7500 watts, or expressed in dollars, $1.28 per day. That is $38.50 per month which is more then I hoped for by getting rid of my hot water heater! In the course of a year that is $467.00 without an appreciable level of inconvenience .

Of course that is assuming my math is right!

I don't follow your coffee pot math. If your electric is 0.14 per KWH, then the coffee pot should cost 0.21/hr that the heating element is running full-bore. Don't most of them switched to a lower temperature once the coffee is brewed? My coffee pot is insulated, and once the coffee is brewed everything shuts off.

Back to the propane...ask your supplier what the price per gallon would be if you used 500 gallons or more per year. If that gets you back on the books as a "heating customer" (500 annual gallons is the cutoff in my area for any kind of reasonable price), the math might look a little different.

NoSmoke wrote:... my coffee pot ... guess that it uses about 1500 watts. I get up early and drink a lot of coffee ... making a pot of coffee this morning at 03:00 when I got up, and keeping it on until 08:00

Some things you should never compromise on, and coffee is one of them.
A coffee maker probably draws 1500 watts while it is heating the water to brew with, but that only takes a few minutes. The rest of the time it is just keeping the pot warm. Probably costs you only 10 cents a day, total.

Rob R. wrote:I don't follow your coffee pot math. If your electric is 0.14 per KWH, then the coffee pot should cost 0.21/hr that the heating element is running full-bore. Don't most of them switched to a lower temperature once the coffee is brewed? My coffee pot is insulated, and once the coffee is brewed everything shuts off.

Back to the propane...ask your supplier what the price per gallon would be if you used 500 gallons or more per year. If that gets you back on the books as a "heating customer" (500 annual gallons is the cutoff in my area for any kind of reasonable price), the math might look a little different.

Ha...not enough coffee this morning I guess. I was thinking 17 cents per kw which is what we used to pay before the price came down. You are right, it is only 14 cents per killowatt!

As for the coffee maker; you might be right. I checked some stuff on the internet and they say a 12 cup coffee maker uses 1200-1500 watts per hour. They never specified if that was just during brewing or all the time. What I need to do is, go to the local library and check out one of those kill-o-watt testing units that tells you exactly what appliances are drawing.

rberq wrote:A coffee maker probably draws 1500 watts while it is heating the water to brew with, but that only takes a few minutes. The rest of the time it is just keeping the pot warm. Probably costs you only 10 cents a day, total.

This is most likely the case with the coffee maker.. As for the dryer, it draws hard while its used.. Maybe an hour a day or two at most, I'm guessing. So unless you run the dryer 8 hours a day, its not a huge portion of the electric bill... Hot water tank, different story. It takes a relatively huge amount of energy to heat a big mass of water. Maintaining its temperature doesn't take very much. If your TV is on all day it probably uses more power than the dryer being used for one hour.

No fear of that...no TV! (I like to limit what the kids watch so the best way to do that is with no TV, BUT boy watch the kids where there is a TV and it like a moth to a flame...they stare blankly at it, mesmerized. I guess it is no big surprise then that studies show you use more brain capacity sleeping then you do watching TV).

I might still move forward with this project, only because I have the stuff to make this without spending much on it, and I am approaching the height of the heating season. For very little money I can see if this works and am not out anything if its doesn't. I got some parts yesterday and gathered up my collection of parts and am off to cobble something together, staying low-tech at first as a trial run.