Hello everyone,
I`m back with another piece of juicy eco-investor information for you. Today, I`ll be talking about hot water.
There`s a lot of talk out there about tankless hot water systems being an efficient subsitute for the old tanked systems.
In general, tankless systems do offer advantages over clumsy tank systems. The primary one being that you only pay to heat water when you need it, not to keep a huge vat of it warm all day even if you`re out of town. However, the hurdle that I, as an eco-investor, keep running into, is the payback period. Tankless systems can run you well over one thousand dollars, and with annual savings measured in the sub-$100 range, the payback period can be 10 years or longer: not bad if you`re a pension fund, but not necessarily the BEST use of our hard earned, opportunity cost ridden cash flow!
Enter the Watercycle.
There`s a group out of Saskatchewan that I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago (they`ve come a long way since then), that has developed a simple, yet highly effective device. The technical name for it is a "Drain Water Heat Recovery System" and it works like this:
Think about what happens when you use hot water in, let`s say, the shower. That water has been sitting in your tank nice and hot all day waiting for you to use it. You`ve had to use a fair bit of natural gas to get it that way. Then you turn on the tap, it sprinkles you with hot, steamy goodness for all of a split second, and then it spirals its way down your drain, along with the money you just spent to heat it up. There`s got to be a better way.
The watercycle is a device that you install, made of highly conductive 1/2" copper pipe, coiled around a 48" length of 4" copper pipe, that attaches to a section of your 4" ABS drain. It`s purpose is to transfer the heat from the hot water leaving your house to the cold water entering it.
Remember, when you draw down your hot water tank, you also begin filling it with cold water from the municipality, which then needs to be heated up. Hence, when we shower for a long time, we sometimes run out of hot water!
With the watercycle, cold water entering the house is pre-heated by hot water leaving the house, before it ever gets to the hot water tank. This way, it`s already quite warm when it hits the tank. The result is that you virtually eliminate ever having a cold shower, use significantly less fuel to heat up your water (which results in less harmful GHG emissions), while extending the life of your hot water tank and saving you money in the process!
I haven`t seen the latest ROI figures, but what I can tell you is that the Watercycle retails in the hundreds of dollars, and with similar annual savings to those of the tankless systems, your payback period is reduced to a matter of years. This means healthy double digit annual returns to you.
I can also tell you that I was one of the first people in Calgary to install one in my home and it has worked beautifully for me for over 2 years now. In a house that has been known to have up to 6 people staying in it, we`ve never run out of hot water!
To be in accordance with full disclosure, I am not affiliated with this group and receive no monetary compensation for doing this. I just want to spread the knowledge, and encourage other REIN members to take eco-investing more seriously, because collectively we own a whole lot of real estate and if each one of us did a few things, we`d be well on our way to a sustainable future for everyone!
Happy Eco-Investing,
Kevin Ablett
p.s. for more info on the Watercycle please visit www.watercycles.ca
I`m back with another piece of juicy eco-investor information for you. Today, I`ll be talking about hot water.
There`s a lot of talk out there about tankless hot water systems being an efficient subsitute for the old tanked systems.
In general, tankless systems do offer advantages over clumsy tank systems. The primary one being that you only pay to heat water when you need it, not to keep a huge vat of it warm all day even if you`re out of town. However, the hurdle that I, as an eco-investor, keep running into, is the payback period. Tankless systems can run you well over one thousand dollars, and with annual savings measured in the sub-$100 range, the payback period can be 10 years or longer: not bad if you`re a pension fund, but not necessarily the BEST use of our hard earned, opportunity cost ridden cash flow!
Enter the Watercycle.
There`s a group out of Saskatchewan that I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago (they`ve come a long way since then), that has developed a simple, yet highly effective device. The technical name for it is a "Drain Water Heat Recovery System" and it works like this:
Think about what happens when you use hot water in, let`s say, the shower. That water has been sitting in your tank nice and hot all day waiting for you to use it. You`ve had to use a fair bit of natural gas to get it that way. Then you turn on the tap, it sprinkles you with hot, steamy goodness for all of a split second, and then it spirals its way down your drain, along with the money you just spent to heat it up. There`s got to be a better way.
The watercycle is a device that you install, made of highly conductive 1/2" copper pipe, coiled around a 48" length of 4" copper pipe, that attaches to a section of your 4" ABS drain. It`s purpose is to transfer the heat from the hot water leaving your house to the cold water entering it.
Remember, when you draw down your hot water tank, you also begin filling it with cold water from the municipality, which then needs to be heated up. Hence, when we shower for a long time, we sometimes run out of hot water!
With the watercycle, cold water entering the house is pre-heated by hot water leaving the house, before it ever gets to the hot water tank. This way, it`s already quite warm when it hits the tank. The result is that you virtually eliminate ever having a cold shower, use significantly less fuel to heat up your water (which results in less harmful GHG emissions), while extending the life of your hot water tank and saving you money in the process!
I haven`t seen the latest ROI figures, but what I can tell you is that the Watercycle retails in the hundreds of dollars, and with similar annual savings to those of the tankless systems, your payback period is reduced to a matter of years. This means healthy double digit annual returns to you.
I can also tell you that I was one of the first people in Calgary to install one in my home and it has worked beautifully for me for over 2 years now. In a house that has been known to have up to 6 people staying in it, we`ve never run out of hot water!
To be in accordance with full disclosure, I am not affiliated with this group and receive no monetary compensation for doing this. I just want to spread the knowledge, and encourage other REIN members to take eco-investing more seriously, because collectively we own a whole lot of real estate and if each one of us did a few things, we`d be well on our way to a sustainable future for everyone!
Happy Eco-Investing,
Kevin Ablett
p.s. for more info on the Watercycle please visit www.watercycles.ca
