Detailed Guide To Help You Compare Water Storage Heater Energy Costs

Part 1:

How do I select the perfect electric hot water heater?

When you want to buy an electric hot water heater, there are two critical factors that you need to consider. These are the Energy Factor and First Hour Rating. These two factors are explained in detail and you can go there by clicking the relevant links below...Hot Water Heaters Energy Factors And First Hour Rating For Hot Water Heaters

The cost of the energy source is also very important and you know that electricity is much more expensive when compared to other energy sources.. If you cannot afford an electric water heater, then perhaps you can consider buying a gas fired tankless and storage heaters

Energy factor: The energy factors of an electric tankless (on demand hot water heater) and electric storage heaters are not the same. The energy factor is critical and knowing it will help you calculate the amount of energy used per annum. You must use the cost of electricity per kiloWatt hour. For this example I have used $0.06 per kiloWatt hour.

You can use the table below to estimate your annual costs taking into account your approximate water usage per day for every day of the year and you can see in the red section the impact that the Energy factor has on the total cost per year. For example by comparing the purple line and the bottom red line, it is clear that if you use 65 gallons per day of hot water (77 degrees above cold water inlet) using an efficient 0.99 Energy factor unit that you will save (315.00 - 270.45 = $44.55) per year.

Clearly there are significant saving in converting from electricity to gas hot water heaters ....

After a decade you will have saved $445. Remember that a gas fired tankless heater could have cost only $107 per year to perform the same job.

It is evident that there you make big savings when you switch from electric to gas hot water heaters.... despite the higher efficiency of the electric hot water heaters.

Clearly there are significant saving in converting from electricity to gas hot water heaters .... despite the higher efficiency of the electric hot water heaters.

Note that any percentage saving in Energy Factor has a lower percentage saving effect upon the bill you will pay .... this leads to what can be considered misleading advertising.

To give you an example for any hot water heater (tankless or storage) an Energy factor of 0.85 is 30.7% better than an Energy Factor unit of 0.65 but the cost saving is not 30.7%. In actual fact the cost saving is only 23.5%

This table below shows Energy factor difference between best and worst units for different types of tankless and storage tank hot water heaters. This table clearly shows that tankless hot water heaters are much more efficient than storage hot water heaters.

The Energy Factor in simple terms means that if the Energy Factor is high then the annual cost of power to run the tanklless hot water heater or the storage heater will be lower than it would be if the Energy Factor was low. Gas tankless water heaters have an Energy Factors that ranges between 0.64 and 0.82

The First Hour Rating is the amount of hot water the heater can supply in an hour. If you are using a storage tank system then this means that the tank will be full of hot water at the beginning of the first hour.

Part 2 how to buy an electric hot water heater

You can read a wide range ofwater usage articles. They discuss the use of water in the house and home ... topics covered include filters, heaters, softeners and water in the garden.