Along with Our Utility Bill!
In a nutshell, we wanted to do something more. While our florescent light bulbs were in place throughout our entire house and we just finished converting our outdoor light fixtures to accommodate the new fluorescent floodlights, we wanted to do more… something more dramatic.
The idea of preheating the water with the sum before it entered our natural gas hot water heater had been percolating for sometime. It seemed simple enough… find an inexpensive way to route the water out of the house and into some kind of solar collector, and then back into the house a whole lot hotter than it left. Have it leave the house just before entering the hot water heater and then back in and directly into the gas hot water heater at a nice hot temperature.
While this idea works well for the months before it freezes, it can’t be used in the colder seasons, so any system we constructed would have to allow us to easily switch it back to a direct route into the hot water heater as well as to drain the water out of the collector.
Even for us Minnesotans, limited as we are to only 7 months when water doesn’t freeze, it seemed to us that if the system was easy to build and install, and didn’t cost us too much, it would pay back the cost of it in a few years and give us some savings from then on. More environmental quotes and commentarty here.
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