Electric water Heater indoor or outdoor 1

[AliNaseem2]

HI ,

Dear All ,

I have always seen that the Electric water heater is installed indoor . What if we place the Circulation pumps and Electric water heater out door into the direct sun . what will be the effects of this , or is it highly recommend that the Electric water heater should be placed indoor as any cost .

Please feed me with Comments

thanks ,

 

[IRstuff]

Please refrain from all bold; it's only slightly worse than all caps.


The effect will very minimal. Most homes rarely need hot water when the sun is shining. The amount of heat you get into the water heater is a function of the insulation. What heat goes in through the insulation, comes back out through the insulation. Additionally, an outdoor installation means that even colder temperatures are experienced at night, so you'd need even more insulation, or you burn even more energy to keep the water hot enough for everyone's morning showers. If the insulation is thicker, then even less solar heat gets through.

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
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[JohnRBaker]

You might be better off investing in a system such as this:

For some other ideas, go to:

http://inspectapedia.com/Solar/Solar_Hot_Water.php

John R. Baker, P.E.
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[ornerynorsk]

Electrical appliances designed for use in a conditioned environment should not be installed outdoors. Corrosion, electrical problems, and insulation spoilage are the first 3 things that come to mind.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[dbill74]

As far as being able to produce hot water, it does not make a difference if a water heater is place indoors or outdoors.

However, if you were to place a water heater outdoors, it will need to be protected from the elements. The casing needs to be weather sealed, all connections need to be weather sealed. All this weather sealing costs money greatly increasing the cost of the water heater.

If you were to install a water heater that is not designed for outdoor use outside, you will have problems with rust and galvanic corrosion greatly reducing the life of the water heater and likely voiding any warranties.

 

[IRstuff]

Is there a gas option? Electric water heaters sound good from a pure efficiency perspective, i.e., all the input power goes into heating the water. Unfortunately, electricity is very expensive compared to gas. I used to live in a house with an electric water heater in the semi-detached garage; the electricity bill in winter time was always a shocker.

Note that the farther the water heater is from the house, the more usage annoyances exist, regardless of the heat source:
> Delay in getting hot water to the point of use, particularly overnight
> Excessive heat loss in the plumbing, particularly if the pipes are buried. As compared to typical household plumbing being the roof, with only air thermal loss, mitigated by insulation
> The excessive heat loss is also manifested as increased heating bills, whether electric or gas
> The increased heat loss also means that the water heater itself needs to be run at a higher temperature to compensate for the heat loss, which lowers the life of the water heater

Solar heaters have some issues, in my experience:
> Reliability is lower, due to extra plumbing and valves
> Again, a large percentage of water usage is in the morning showers, when there's no hot water left in the solar path, while the peak availability of solar heated water is in the afternoon, when few people need hot water.
> The extra length of piping to get the solar water into the cold water inlet adds to the total pipe resistance, which lowers the hot water pressure compared to a more normal configuration; this can have the effect of a lower temperature output, thereby requiring running a higher water heater temperature, which can kill whatever cost savings there possibly could have been
> If the major hot water usage is when there's insufficient heated solar water, the solar path could be bypassed quite often, which can lead to a reservoir of stale water stuck in the solar heater path.

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
faq731-376 forum1529

 

[berkshire]

If there is not enough space in a building for a water heater, there are commercially available enclosures that can be mounted to an exterior wall to protect the said heater from the elements.
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

 

[dgallup]

The relatively new heat pump water heaters improve the efficiency greatly over resistance heat. A friend has one, he uses the cold air output to keep his wine cellar cool. It's a win-win.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[TenPenny]

If you live in a climate where the living space needs to be heated for much of the year, it makes sense to put it in a heated space, since any heat lost will go to help heat the space.

If you live in a climate where the living space needs to be cooled for much of the year, it makes sense to put in outside of the cooled space, for the same reason. I'm not saying outdoors, but out of the cooled space.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Here in SoCal, in most homes you'll find the water heater in the garage. Of course, a number of the newer homes are now opting for tankless water heaters so this 'rule-of-thumb' is no longer as relevant as it would be for traditional units.

John R. Baker, P.E.
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[IRstuff]

Garage is a loosely defined term, since my example from above was in Pasadena, which was a detached garage, and therefore had little protection against winter temperatures. All of the houses I've lived in since then had attached garages (Brea), or the garage was an integral part of the house. In both of the latter cases, the garage's temperature was coupled to the house's and therefore did not drop as severely as it would in a detached garage.

My current neighborhood is probably 25% tankless, typically detectable by the massive exhaust ports sticking out of the garage, since the BTUs required to get instant-on water is pretty gigantic. Since one of the big selling points is the elimination of the tank, the volume of the tankless heater is substantially smaller, which means that the temperature ranges within the system during operation are substantially larger than with a tanked water heater.

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
faq731-376 forum1529