By Don Douglas
We decided to replace our gas-fired water heater about three years ago. The old water heater was a replacement for the electric water heater that had failed just when WEC was paying an incentive to change from electric to propane to help members keep their bills as low as possible.
This time there’s an incentive to change from fossil fuels back to a heat pump electric water heater. The gas-fired water heater was still working but we wanted to try the new heat pump water heater for a couple of reasons. We heat our two hundred year old house with a wood furnace which is in the old root cellar just behind the wall for our kitchen and dining room. The cellar is very hot all winter while we are burning wood. We wanted to capture the excess heat and use it to heat our water. The idea of a heat pump is basically very simple, it’s just moving heat from one place to another. The old water heater used electric resistance to produce heat, like a toaster or a regular electric stove. The heat pump transfers the heat from the air in the cellar to the water in the tank. The other advantage for us was the location of the new water heater. We moved it from a far corner to the center of the wall in front of the wood furnace. That let us put in a laundry sink in that corner where there was a drain for the washing machine.
There other were other benefits I did not realize at first. The cellar was always a little damp and during the summer months we had to run a dehumidifier or mold would begin to grow. The heat pump water heater also takes humidity out of the air which we could channel down to the drain where we installed the laundry sink. And in the summer, besides removing humidity, the heat pump water heater also acts as an air conditioner and made the whole house a few degrees cooler.
However, it’s hard to be an advocate for energy efficiency when you suffer financially. First of all, every application is a little bit different, it really depends on the specific location in your house and what benefits you can realize. There is an incentive from Efficiency Vermont and WEC, but the heat pump water heater is still more expensive than a traditional propane water heater. In addition, the heat pump is a much more complicated device. After less than three years the motherboard failed. It was under warranty and a new one was shipped very quickly, but the warranty did not cover the labor. I believe that all of the brands available use the same vendors for the electronics and I was unhappy to learn that this is the sixth upgrade to the heat pump water heater that we purchased. It is a Bradford White and the model number starts with RE2H. Perhaps the seventh model will be more reliable. Nobody expects to purchase a new water heater every three years!
Don Douglas of Orange is the Treasurer of WEC’s Board of Directors.
Co-op Currents invites members to write in with their honest experiences buying and installing hot water heat pumps, cold climate heat pumps, electric vehicles, and other new electric tech. Submit stories to currents@wec.coop.