Hot Water Heaters

[norgeway]

Hotpoints!!!

In the old days, Hotpoints had elements that were NOT immersion units, they were bands that went AROUND the tank, not quite as fast, but LONG LASTING!!

 

[tomturbomatic]

GE shared those elements with Hotpoint, small wonder. I can't help but imagine that they were not as efficient as the immersion type.

 

[58limited]

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<a name="start_44274.650796">A440 wrote:</a>

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<a name="start_44274.650796">"Retired after 52 Years of use. Nothing wrong with it. Gas company said it was way too old and red tagged it."</a>

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Oh that's great, now you'll be replacing it every 7 years or so from now on.  Everything new is JUNK !  This sort of thing burns my a**.

 

Ken D.

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How did the gas company see it? Were they working on something else? Are you required to have a periodic inspection? I've never had the gas company come into my house for any reason. When they serviced the outdoor gas lines and replaced the meter, I told them I'd light my own pilots.

 

My house still has the original Ruud Monel gas water heater from 1936 and it works fine.

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[retromania]

Ruud Monel Water Heater

Is that cool or what.  You win! 

 

 

 

[58limited]

A local mansion/museum here still has the original working copper 20gal. water heater from 1905. I don't know the manufacturer.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Speaking of water heaters, does anyone recall seeing the typ

Matt,
Do you mean the ones that were counter height and depth with a porcelain top with backsplash? They were available in both gas and electric. They were often in kitchens in the south where there were no basements. I think they were usually 30 gallon tanks.

 

[luxflairguy]

"looked like a washer or..."

There were two names associated with this style: cabinet style or GE used "Table Top".

 

[retromania]

Anything 90 and above can direct vent. Anything below 80 wo

I'm confused. What's the difference between direct vent and or requiring a flue? Do you mean PVC vs metal?

 

[gusherb]

Don't have an old house so don't have an old water heater like a few of you guys are showing off! But our 50 gallon Ruud with the high recovery 60,000 BTU burner (as opposed to the typical 40k burner) think it's called the Ruudglas Pacemaker is going on 23 years old very soon.
Everyone else on the block had to replace theirs at the 11-15 year mark back between 2002-2006.

It's either Bradford-White or State here (rebadged AO Smith), would rather go with a Rheem/Ruud when the time comes as I keep hearing that Bradford-White's are only lasting 5-8 years around my area. Don't like AO Smith/State.

In the suburbs hot water heat is very hard to come by, even houses from the turn of the century before last had the cheaper gravity-hot-air furnaces with giant "octopus" ductwork. Fortunately I live in a newer not so drafty home with properly sized gas furnaces, because I hate forced air heat. My dad's 3 unit 3 story apartment building in Chicago built in 1915 has hot water with cast iron radiators and as drafty and uninsulated as that brick building is it's incredibly comfortable with the thermostat set to 70, gas bills are 600 dollars though! (used to be 1000 with the old 1950's boiler)

 

[gusherb]

Andy

Direct vent means that it pulls all of it's air for combustion from outside and will not remove any conditioned air from your home.

The typical water heater that uses a PVC vent vs metal flue is just a standard efficiency water heater with a blower attached that dilutes the hot exhaust with cooler air from the room to cool the exhaust gases down before it enters the PVC pipe so it doesn't melt. The higher end models (like AO Smith Vertex) are actual 90+% efficient water heaters.

 

[retromania]

Sorry.

We were talking about waters heaters weren't we??! I guess I was thinking about the furnace I had put in in 2008. It's a 90% (I freeze by the way. Wish had the old one back minus the extra cost of running it!) efficiency gas furnace and is vented out with PVC. Folks approaching the back door see and hear it and think I am running the dryer. The old furnace vented through the chimney that remains from when there was a coal furnace here.

 

[gusherb]

Furnaces are like you stated originally. 90+% efficient uses PVC for the exhaust. Anything below that uses a metal flue vent. Direct vent still applies in the same way. But the installers don't always run the second pipe for intake air (usually when they want to save time on the job. When the furnace is equipped to bring outside air in for combustion it should be utilized)

boilers for steam and hot water heating is slightly different. boilers below 85% efficient use the traditional metal flue or chimney. 85% efficient can use a stainless steel vent that can be piped out the side. above 90% and it can use PVC just like a 90% furnace.

It's most common to see those PVC vents piped out the side of a building, and that's usually done for convenience. It can be piped out the roof in the same manner as a metal flue too. My neighbors went with a high efficiency furnace and power vent water heater back in 1992 and chose to vent them both out the roof.

 

[retromania]

Thank you

Thanks for the clarification. I have seen the vent plus an intake and didn't know what the intake was until you explained it.

 

[retromania]

NuTone

The house I grew up in had a NuTone exhaust hood over my mother's Custom Imperial range. The control buttons were different colors. The material was brushed aluminum or stainless steel. My guess would be aluminum, but I not sure. It had a cool feature in that the fan/motor could be removed which I saw my mother do quite a few times as she was a clean freak. Guess that's where I got it from. Wish I had it now. It would look great in my old kitchen!!

 

[polkanut]

The woman who does our taxes has a brown natural gas Warm Morning heater in the basement where her office is, and that little thing really makes that entire area nice & toasty warm.  It's about 25y/o and has a standing pilot light.  Before that she had a wood space heater, but it was a pain to use, and by the time you were ready to go back upstairs is when it would start to get warm down there. 

 

[retromania]

I picked my mother up at the assisted-living and took her to a dental appointment and I forgot to ask her details about the Warm Morning Heater they had in the house when she was a little girl. I can't remember what it ran on. It was either wood or coal. After I took her back to her apartment I drove up North Main Street to an Aldi's grocry store. It's warm today and I had the window down. All of a sudden I smelled an odor that was nostalgic for me. When I was a kid we would visit my father's sister and her family at a place they had on Sullivan's Island out from Charleston, SC. They had a gas stove in their kitchen that ran on propane. It always smelled faintly of propane or 'bottled gas' as they called it. To me it has a different odor than natural gas.

 

[sudsmaster]

Department of Redundancy Redundancy

They are called hot water heaters to distinguish them from the warm water heaters and the tepid water heaters, which don't sell very well to begin with.

Realistically, everyone knows what you mean if you say "hot water heater", instead of "water heater". I think there's a natural tendency to add the "hot" to "water heater" because hot water indeed is the desired end result.

As in, you turn on the hot water faucet and nothing but ice cold water comes out. The problem? The gizmo at the other end of the hot water pipe isn't heating properly. You want what comes out of the hot water faucet to be heated. Hence, hot water heater.

 

[sudsmaster]

PVC venting of 90%+ gas furnaces

I have read about these, but am puzzled as to how one hooks up the pipe. I understand that the furnace is so efficient that the exhaust is cool enough not to melt the PVC. But literature I've read indicates that in various jurisdictions, the exhaust condensate is acidic enough that it's not legal to discharge it on the ground, but rather it must be sent down a drain. Where I suppose it could eat through the drain pipe (by law they have to be cast iron or copper here).

In my house this could present a challenge. While the current gas furnace is in the crawl space, and it vents through a six inch diameter ceramic type of chimney tube to the roof, there are no nearby drains to accept said exhaust condensate were I to upgrade the furnace to a high efficiency one. There would be a convenient run to the nearest foundation vent if dribbling the condensate on the ground (in this case, onto the concrete courtyard/driveway adjacent to the home). I'd be a little worried about staining the concrete and more worried at the acid eating through the concrete.

Is this a legitimate worry? Are people directing the condensate pipe for their HE furnaces onto the ground (or concrete) without problems?

 

[polkanut]

Our new Carrier high efficiency, and our previous Lennox Pulse gas furnaces both have/had a reservior attached to the outside of them to where the condensate collects.  When the reservior is full the float inside trips a small pump, and it is pumped overhead through tubing that is fastened to the floor joists, and it comes down, and drains into the basement sink.  I save the water, and use it for watering houseplants, and in our steam iron.  I've not had any problems with it being too acidic, because it is just condensation.  I usually get a 6qt pail of water every day and a half, even more when the central a/c is in use.

 

[tomturbomatic]

The heated air is exhausted through the 2 or 3 inch pipe. The acidic water usually exits the furnace at a point so low that a condensate pump is used to lift it to a standpipe. My PVC pipe for the furnace drain is shared by at least one washer and then intersects the main line. I hope the condensate does not attack the cast iron sewer pipe, but this house has had a condensing furnace for over 25 years so if it were going to do damage, I guess it is too late to do anything.

I wonder what type of acid it is. Would it be carbonic acid from the combining of the carbon dioxide from combustion with the water vapor in the natural gas? If so, that is not generally a strong acid, but you would not want it sitting, undiluted, in a copper drain trap. It would probably interact with the concrete to form a carbonate. Some experimental prodecures for capturing CO2 have piped it into salt water to form calcium carbonate.