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Comment by upen | Hacker News Reader

So this is why my electricity bill is so high

It's more probable that your bill is high because you haven't done a careful energy audit of your home and all of the devices in it, and one or more of them is malfunctioning or using more energy than you'd expect.

I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.

> I took the time to do this, and found that my electric water heater consumes nearly half of the electricity in my home.

Oh man, do I know this feeling. My old duplex I moved out of last year had an electric water heater from 1991, it easily ate up 1/3 of our electric usage every month. New house has a gas water heater, during the summer months our gas water heater results in a $20 gas bill (roughly $10 of that is the connection and other assorted fees).

Old water heaters, especially electric ones can really suck energy like nothing else. My summer electric bill at the new house is still roughly $30/mo cheaper and I'm running like 500W of gear 24/7 in my office/lab that wasn't at the old place.

Same here. We switched over from an electric water heater to a gas one, and it was such a difference on our power bill that it paid for itself in less than a year. Even with running folding@home, BOINC, etc on all of my home machines, our bill is still less. Electric water heaters are expensive!

As an added bonus the heat coming out of the hot water heater might be inside the home where it has to be removed via AC meaning that not only is that heat being wasted instead of providing hot water, it's also increasing your AC usage and wasting even more power.

It's likely that the cost savings was just due to the fact that natural gas is so much cheaper than electricity, unit for unit.

I'm curious how you did your energy audit and found the water heater was the culprit. Did you hire someone else, or do it yourself... if so, how?

Did it myself. I'm sure it wasn't precisely accurate, but, good enough: just go down to the breaker panel, switch off each circuit there, then turn on each circuit individually with its usual devices connected. In the case of appliances like the fridge, stove/oven, clothes dryer, run the device with a normal load. With the water heater, I just ran hot water until it kicked on.

Then observe change at meter, write it down, and do some math.

As an added benefit, I got to verify and one case relabel the circuits.

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