Perhaps you’ve seen them… those insulating jackets for wrapping around a hot water tank to reduce heat loss. Do they work? Yup. Are they worth it? Maybe. But can you do better? Definitely. In this article I want to demonstrate that it usually makes sense to add MUCH more insulation around a hot water tank than you might otherwise think.<\/p>\n
Yes, there is, and it can be defined as follows: If adding more insulation costs you more than it saves you over a tolerable payback period then it’s too much insulation. You can think of “cost” in terms of dollars or in terms of environmental footprint depending what your concerns are. Assuming you’re primarily interested in saving money, it’s fairly easy to estimate what you can save by adding more insulation to a hot water tank. A typical electric hot water tank may consume around 250W of continuous power on average. Over one year that amounts to 2190 kWh of energy. Where I live electricity costs about $0.07 per kWh so a typical electric water heater with no additional insulation might cost about $150 per year to operate. Depending on use, perhaps $50 of this is actually used to raise the temperature of the incoming cold water. The remaining $100 is wasted in the form of heat dissipation to the surroundings. \u00a0A typical electric hot water tank may have about 5cm thickness of fiberglass insulation built-in. Assuming you will be insulating the outside of the tank with a similar material, the power consumption to maintain a given tank temperature will be inversely proportional to the total insulation thickness. So if you add another 5cm of insulation, doubling the total thickness, you will half the cost per year to maintain the tank at temperature. With a little math, it’s not difficult to figure out how much insulation can be added to achieve payback within a certain number of years.<\/p>\n
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