Also the water out your water heater is dirtier usually. The tds reading is double out my water heater as opposed to my cold. My tanks even have less total dissolved solids than my hot water. Water heaters hold a lot of lime/calcium build up in them. I wouldn't exclusively use my hot water even if I let it cool down.
Hot Water drip system
- Thread starter srt4geezer
- Start date
There are many that use a hot water drip for a continuous water change an to negate the use of heaters. I use one on my 500 with a 100 gallon sump and once dialed in the tank remains a solid 75 degrees. In the summer the ac In the house runs so I don't see an increase in the temp at all. It's a win win. I use less than 150 watts of electricity total to run 600 gallons of total volume.
Do you purge the bottom of your water heater, for sediments/contaminants, a few times a year?
I haven't done a drip system, yet, but I've been thinking about it for a tank in my basement. My thinking is a half gallon drip an hour (assuming I read that right) of cold water would be hard pressed to cause any kind of noticeable drop of temperature in 300 gallons plus of 75-85 degree water. You could probably throw the 12 gallons of water you're dripping daily into the tank all at once and maybe the heater might turn on for a few minutes.
I'd just tap into the cold and reduce the risk of minerals from the hot water. There's gotta be some good references out there regarding this. There are some handy calculators out there that give a rough idea of how much water you'd actually be changing out over the course of the week. A half gallon drip every hour doesn't necessarily mean 84 gallons of old tank water gets changed out weekly because a portion of that new water will be going out the overflow along with old water. You might find yourself bumping the drip volume up, still don't know if cold water would be an issue in most cases.
I'd just tap into the cold and reduce the risk of minerals from the hot water. There's gotta be some good references out there regarding this. There are some handy calculators out there that give a rough idea of how much water you'd actually be changing out over the course of the week. A half gallon drip every hour doesn't necessarily mean 84 gallons of old tank water gets changed out weekly because a portion of that new water will be going out the overflow along with old water. You might find yourself bumping the drip volume up, still don't know if cold water would be an issue in most cases.
Tap into both lines and add a mixing valve. You can get a decent one for under $50. I tapped into my washing machine hook ups and ran 1/4" poly line to the tank. 40 gpd into my 180 with 40 gal sump + 29 gal plant refugium. Dialed it to the tank temp. Still have to mount the mixing valve to the wall.
Because its a waste and is massively inefficient and accomplishes very little.. unless you're doing this within 4 feet of your water heater. You're talking about a drip rate... just how "hot" do think the water is going to be at the end of a 15-20 foot or longer pipe segment? All you're doing is heating the first several feet of pipe out of the heater if that.
I still don't know what the deal is with mixing the hot and cold. I dump 80 gallons a day of ice cold water on my 750 and the temp drops 2*. I do water changes on my other tank drops the temp like 6*. Been doing this for 25 years with no problems there are so many hard minerals sitting in hot water heaters. Why take the chance
