Energy Advice

Welcome to our energy advice column. Here we summarize publicly available information on the many ways you can save money on your energy bills as well as general topics on renewable energy. We try to keep our advice short and to the point.

RECYCLING HOT WATER

Conserving energy is the first task in going green with renewable energy.

There's another device, like the “Kill a Watt,” that will help you save money on energy bills. This one lets you reclaim the heat from your hot water after you've used it for the laundry, dishwashing and showers—the biggest hot water users. It's amazing to see how many ways there are to be ingenious with regard to energy conservation

Hot water counts for more than 20 percent of a typical household’s energy consumption—and 90 percent of this energy goes down the drain almost immediately. Yes, the hot water we use to take showers, do the laundry, and wash dishes is still very hot when it goes down the drain. Unless it’s recaptured, this hot water is lost energy.

A device called The Power-Pipe™ proposes to do just that. It takes the hot water run off to warm the incoming cold water from the street. By using copper coils wrapped around an inner pipe, the Power Pipe™ transfers heat from the waste hot water to the incoming clean cold water. The copper coils act as a heat exchanger. The hot water passes through the straight-through pipe while the cold water runs through the copper coils. This design—having a vertical-through pipe inside the coils—ensures that wastewater can drain properly.

The manufacturer claims that a Power-Pipe™ having a 60 inch long inner pipe can raise the temperature of the incoming cold water as much as 24 degrees centigrade. This is a considerable amount of reclaimed heat.

Depending on your water usage, you can recover the cost of this device in less than two years. The unit is simple, has no moving parts, and can last as much as 50 years.

It's manufactured by RenewABILITY Energy Corporation, in Canada, and prices range from $500-$1000 depending on size.