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Will this save $-re. furnace/hot water

16 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
16 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
16 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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bry84
16 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
16 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
16 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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