Solar water heaters add to home's energy efficiency

Recently, we wrote about tankless water heaters.

Following its publication, we were contacted by a nice gentleman named Larry Wilkins.

Wilkins has been in the tankless water heater business for many years, and operates a company called Envirotherm.

We visited his office so he could share his expertise and enthusiasm for tankless water heaters. Wilkins emphasized that tankless water heaters can increase the energy efficiency of your home in more ways than one.

As you may recall, a tankless water heater is a small, electric- or gas-fired appliance that takes the place of a standard water heater.

The traditional unit that probably stands in your basement has a 30-gallon to 75-gallon tank of water that is kept heated day and night, whether you need it or not.

A tankless unit runs water on demand through a small maze of piping where it absorbs heat from the burner assembly and then passes out into the supply system.

The tankless water heater saves money, since you are not burning energy to maintain that large tank of hot water 24/7 in your home.

But with its initial cost being two to three times higher than the standard water heater, there is a monetary payback factor to consider. On the plus side, because of the greater efficiency, there is also an environmental savings of thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

Although a tankless water heater is pretty impressive on its own, Wilkins pointed out that it is also possible to convert your forced-air gas furnace to use hot water to heat the air it blows by removing the burner units and installing a fan coil.

In a typical forced-air unit, when the thermostat tells the system that room temperatures are below a set comfort level, the air handler kicks on, drawing room air from a "cold-air return" through ductwork into the furnace's heat exchanger, which is a combustion chamber around which the air flows.

This heat-exchange system can be removed and a fan coil installed in its place within the furnace body.

It is this coil that uses hot water from the tankless unit to transfer heat to the air moving through the furnace and out into the ductwork system in your home.