Hot Water Heaters

[retromania]

The water heater in the basement where I live is an electric Hotpoint and it is 47 years old. It has never given a bit of trouble. Now that I've said that it will probably die! The reason for this post is I hope someone will remember this model of water heater and can tell me what it was called. It was at my aunt's house up the street. She and my uncle lived in an 1800's house that was modified several times through the years. Their hot water heater was in the kitchen in broad view. It was a gas water heater made by Sears, but it was not a Kenmore. I want to say it was a Mopar, but that was the name of Chrysler parts, etc. I wanted to say Hobart, but that was the original manufacturer of Kitchenaid. It was tall and was two-tone in color. It had a water temperature knob on the outside of the unit that you could slide up and down. You could hear it fire up which surprised me because it was so well insulated that I never felt any heat coming off of it. When you turned the hot tap on at the kitchen sink it would rumble rumble. That was sort of scary like it was fixin to blow up. Does anyone remember what badge Sears put on a water heater other than Kenmore? Oh, and I would say it was probably installed in the early 1960's.

 

[danemodsandy]

Homart:

Was Sears' brand for water heaters for a while.

 

[retromania]

Sandy,

That's it, Homart!

 

[retromania]

My gas furnace is vented to the outside. When I have to replace the hot water heater I will see if it can be replaced with a gas unit. Should be able to vent it out with the furnace if code allows.

 

[wayupnorth]

Growing up, we had a Sears Homart FHA furnace and water heater. But if you really want to save money in the long run, the new tankless, on demand gas water heaters work great if you only have 1 hot water faucet open at a time. Gas models can vent right thru a basement or side wall and take up almost no space. I now have an oil fired boiler for heat and hot water that works on the same principal. But you cant shower and do a load in the dishwasher without one side going cold. And with wind chill values to be up to -35 tonight here, the boiler wont shut off.

 

[mattl]

Speaking of water heaters, does anyone recall seeing the type that was made to look like a washer or dryer?

 

[retromania]

Yes!!

A neighbor had one when I was a child. I couldn't figure it out. I said to myself 'where are the knobs, burners and oven door?' LOL! I believe that model of water heater was still being manuafactured not too terribly long ago. Although, I don't know it it's still made or not. I have a question for the appliance experts. Have any of you ever heard of a Warm Morning Heather that also sported a water tank for a very limited amount of hot water? My mother said that what they had growing up. She was the youngest of eight children and they lived in a large Victorean house when she was a little girl She's now 87. Said it was located in the rear of the front hall sort of out of sight. Said the heat rose up the stair well and sort of supplied heat to the upstairs. That was their only source of heat other than a fireplace in every room. That was the arrangement until she was a junior in college when her father built a new house with all modern eveything. Said she came home for Christmas break to the new house. Said she missed their old house as outdated as it was. Oh, and she said becuase her aging mother didn't know how to operate any of the new appliances in the new house (wood burning stove in old house + an oil stove that she said wasn't used much). All the kitchen appliances plus washer in the and dryer in the laundry room were Hotpoint furnish by Duke Power Company (now Duke Energy). Duke sent a home economist out to the house to show my grandmother how to use everything. That house was considered sort of in the country at the time. Now it is right off of North Main Steet behind the fence at Bojangles.

 

[retromania]

Sorry....

Th post I deleted was a story about the Hotpoint appliances in my mother's parents house and I remembered I had already told it. Thanks.

 

[polkanut]

I don't know about building codes in SC, but here each gas appliance that requires venting out of the house needs to have its own separate exhaust pipe.

 

[norgeway]

Homart,,,

It was probably a Homart 600, that was the top of the line.

 

[kimball455]

My house had a 'cabinet' electric hot water heater. It had the same look and size of a washer or dryer and the same height. It took forever to heat water. It was replaced with a standard vented gas hot water heater. When I updated the heating system to baseboard hot water I installed an indirect boiler. The mod/con heating boiler heats the hot water indirectly by circulation hot water to the remote tank. I have a Triangle Tube indirect tank. It is a tank in a tank. Boiler water circulates in the outer tank heating the water. I have not been able to run out of hot water with laundry, dishwasher and shower at the same time. Hot water heat is fantastic but if you want AC too, you have to install separate system. I did that by installing mini split AC. End result is 3 heating zones and 4 AC zones.

 

[danemodsandy]

Please:

It's a "water heater," not a "hot water heater."

A "hot water heater" would be a device intended for heating water that is already hot, which would seem to be an expensive and useless endeavor.

 

[tomturbomatic]

The reason you heard it fire up was because the burner had to be open to the room air to support combustion. Sears marketed some two and three stage burner water heaters that ignited on the lowest BTU input to prevent "flame rollout" and then shifted to the higher BTU inputs depending on the drop in water temperature like in periods of high demand. In esssence, it normally cycled on the lowest input, but could increase to keep up with consecutive hot washes with warm rinses or lots of baths and showers. I think the highest input might have been 75,000 BTUs on the TOL model while the two stage burners on the next model in the line might have had 40,000 and 55 or 60,000 BTU inputs.

We had a Homart with a beautiful almost eye-level marque or escutcheon that had subdued shades of turquoise and brass with designs possibly reflecting the 4 seasons around the centrally placed HOMART. The builder's original tank was 30 gallons and I think it was replaced after it started spitting rust at around the 5 year mark with a 40 gallon model. Daddy and a neighbor with a Ford station wagon took me with them to the Sears warehouse where we picked up the new tank. There was a big picture window on the front of the warehouse with an LK pair on display, possibly from 1959 or 1960. The two of them replaced the tank on a Saturday afternoon. It must have been a 10 year tank because it was still going strong when we sold the house in 67 and it had always been operated at the maximum setting which back then was 160F except when we went out of town and it was turned down to the lowest setting.

 

[foxchapel]

retromania - about that venting ...

>>My gas furnace is vented to the outside. When I have to replace the hot water heater
>>I will see if it can be replaced with a gas unit. Should be able to vent it out with the furnace if code allows.

It depends. When we replaced our gas furnace with a high-efficiency unit, the furnace venting got changed to a horizontal one thru the brick veneer.

Our gas water heater continued to use the old thru--the-roof vent pipe that it shared with the old low-efficiency furnace. As all this was rather new to our area when we made the switch, nobody anticipated what happened next:

From the school of Live and Learn --- the old venting was too wide (diameter) to serve just the water heater and when outside temps in the attic got below a certain point (something like 10° or 15°F). Condensation occurred because, with the furnace exhaust taken out of the equation, more cold air was coming down the vent than hot air going up, which dripped thru the seams in the vent pipe, and dripped on good luggage stored in the attic (right under the vent pipe). I had to have the HVAC guy come out and run a narrower pipe up thru the old vent pipe to the tune of several hundred dollar$.

This was not a codes issue, but more a physics problem.

 

[franksdad]

It's a "water heater," not a "hot water heat

Around these parts you're also likely to also hear someone say "Put some cold Cokes in the ice box!"  Logically speaking, why would you place a Coca-Cola inside a refrigerator to get cold if it is already cold?  Just a colloquilism. 

 

[fido]

Yes, I've sometimes wondered why people call them hot water heaters but then again, why do we in UK call a similar device a boiler when it it meant to operate at temperatures somewhat below boiling point?

 

[nurdlinger]

Our first automatic water heater was a Homart

We got it sometime in the mid-50s. Before that we had a manually-controlled heater, which I do not believe I have ever seen discussed here. It was a non-insulated cylindrical metal tank, with a smaller cylinder grafted on the side which held a coil of tubing and a burner below it. It was like one burner from a gas stove, with the same quarter-turn porcelain-handle valve you found on old stoves. When you needed hot water you lit the burner with a match. I don't remember the details of how the coil of tubing was plumbed into the system, but there was also a loop of bigger pipe (maybe 1-1/4") that passed through the firebox of the adjacent coal furnace to snatch additional heating when there was a fire there.

 

[a440]

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[a440]

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