Energy Smart Design

If you feel that the household hot water demand is running up your utility bills, then going for a highly efficient electric water heater may just be the most prudent energy investment decision.  Typically, households are use to hot water systems that are called "stand-by systems" -- made up of perpetually hot water tanks, that distribute hot water as and when required.  Since this water has to stay hot, some heat will dissipated through the surrounding air.  One way to minimize these "standby losses" is to insulate the tank.  In the old days, external materials such as blankets were widely used for this purpose, as well as in the hope of reducing utility bills.  Modern water heaters with their effective insulation have made this practice obsolete.

High-efficiency water heaters make use of highly insulative foam such as R-19 to reduce this loss, by positioning the form between the tank and the outer surface of water heaters.

Where to Find Information.......

FTC (short for Federal Trade Commission) has made it mandatory that all the water heaters with storage must display an "EnergyGuide" label.  This "EnergyGuide" has to indicate the electricity costs for that particular high efficient water heater, derived from average cost of electricity in the United States.  It also has to show how this operating costs measure up to those with comparable capacities.

Tank Insulation

It used to be common practice to wrap around water heat tanks with blankets to provide the external insulation.  These old water heaters did not have sufficient internal insulation, thus making the external insulation necessary to achieve reduction in "standby losses" and subsequently the operating costs.

Now high-efficiency water heaters come with built-in and high quality insulation, thus making the concept of external insulation blanket unnecessary.  Water heaters that are manufactured in the last 10 years belong to this highly efficient category.  If the water heaters are more than 10 years old, they will be due for replacements.

Water Heater Timer

The standby concept in the old system heats the water all the times.  But in reality, the demand for hot water is pretty restricted, it only happens on certain limited times of a day.  A timer would help us to regulate our energy use; the water heater will get automatically turned on in anticipation of high demand periods and off when usage is insignificant or infrequent.  Majority of these water heaters timers provide the flexibility of multiple daily on/off periods and come with an override option so users can manually control water heating anytime they wish.

A water heater timer can be the most effective cost-saving appliance when used with "time of use" rates -- and most electric utilities companies will give out this information.  As a rule of thumb, rate goes up during peak hours and down during off-peak hours (typically night time). So when you set the water heater timer in a way that operates the heating elements only during off-peak, you can achieve significant savings (absolute dollar amount savings will be dependent on the respective standards and off-peak rates by individual utilities company).