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Will this save $-re. furnace/hot water

19 years ago

Our hot water is off the furnace. In summertime,the furnace goes on several times throughout the day, to keep the water constantly heated. DH & I are the only ones here and we don't need/use hot water that often.

If I shut the furnace off and flip it back on just before we need the hot water, will I be saving money?

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Comments (5)

cynic
19 years ago
My initial thought would be probably but really need more info to take a semi-educated guess. How is it set up and what fuel source? Gas, electric, oil, steam, etc? If the furnace isn't running other than heating the water, then it probably wouldn't make any difference. But if it's running a pilot light constantly, it's burning fuel. So have to know more.
cathyll
Original Author
19 years ago
Thanks, cynic. It's a HWBB system, using fuel oil;all summer, it runs just to heat water. I hear it start several times a day, even when I'm not using hot water.
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I doubt if this will save any oil, as the oil burner should only fire when hot water is called for (unless HEAT is being called for too.) You might save a small amount of electricity by powering down, as there is probably a transformer or other electronics using a few watts of power even when the burner is off. Try posting your question in the heating & cooling forum.
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Thank you. When I re-read my question later, I realized it was impossible to answer without more details. I do hear the unit go on when I run hot water in the sink. And if I remember, it's an indirect feed since there really isn't anywhere to store it. I bought a 100 gallons. I can't imagine that won't last a few months for hot water only. Hoping I can get this complete before heating season.
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Thank you rweigand - I will check and also try to get some photos of the setup. The filter was replaced just a few days ago. Do you reckon having humidity meters on each floor is a good idea? PS: We're in Massachusetts. The weather has been all over the place in recent days. Its rainy and 11C today and tomorrow, and then dry and 21C on Thursday! Hows that for xmas eve? Never thought I'd see that kind of temperature for xmas! mike_home - There is no doubt we have air leakage issues. We have drafty windows (and it is a very old house anyway) that will be replaced in the 2nd week of January and then insulation will be blown in to the external walls on 19-20th of January by a MassSave contractor. Should we wait it out to see what changes the windows and insulation will bring before blaming the HVAC system for all our humidity woes?
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bry84
19 years ago
Our boiler heats the hot water too, and it used to switch on several times a day just to bring the hot water back up to the set temperature. We added more insulation to the hot water storage tank and also insulated the bare pipes attached to it because they were allowing a lot of heat to escape. Since then the boiler only turns on to reheat the water after we have used some.

We did consider only turning it on when we need hot water, either manually or with a timer, but I wasn't sure it would work so well. Our hot water tank takes a long time to fully heat up, and if you only use some of the heated water the rest will just sit there going cold afterwards. I believe that reducing the heat loss has had a better savings effect and we still have hot water whenever we need it (provided the ancient boiler is in a good mood that day!). At any rate, our bills have gone down enough that I'm not worried about making any more savings on the hot water as their return would be very minimal.
jannie
19 years ago
We have oil heat and hot water. One summer, we went away for two weeks and shut off the oil burner. When we came home, we turned it back on and got a big black puff-back cloud that made our entore house filthy. Not worth the few bucks we saved on heating oil!
honest_me
19 years ago
Of corse hot water save the money in washing clothes...when we wash our clothes in cold water it need more washing powder but in hot ..it need very less amount...in this way it save $

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