A heat pump hot water heater can save you nearly $500/year on your energy bill! SDG&E is giving $500 rebates right now, which brings the cost of the heat pump unit down close to the cost of a regular hot water heater. Score!
The picture above shows my old hot water heater and its rating next to the new water heater — $579 annual estimated cost for the old one and only $110/year for the new one! Annual savings: $460 so the payback period for the entire thing was just over two years and after that it’s just gravy!
Be careful to get the right unit. I couldn’t find a hardware store that had the right kind in stock, so I had to order it online. The rebate check from SDG&E came just a couple of weeks later (before the credit card bill).
My handyman installed my new water heater last year before Christmas and it’s been great. A few points to note:
- Heat pump water heaters are a bit slower to recharge — you can empty a regular hot water heater and it will be full of hot water again in a couple of hours, this one is slower when it’s in heat pump mode
- Because it’s a heat pump, it blows cool air into the room when it’s heating the water — free A/C for my laundry room!
- You can’t install it in a closet, it needs ventilation
- It’s got a heat pump thingy on its top, so it’s taller than other water heaters (picture below)
- The connectors were in different places than my old water heater, so my handyman had to run some extra pipe to connect everything up correctly
- There’s a big fancy computer panel on the side — if you have guests and you need a lot of hot water, you can set it to operate in pure electric mode (rather than heat pump mode) so it uses more energy but you get hot water faster; I have mine set for pure heat pump mode all the time which is the most efficient and I’ve always got hot water when I need it.
It looks like a Dalek from Doctor Who, but now that it’s installed, it’s just the same as any other water heater except that my power usage is way down. The picture below shows just after it was delivered, with the old hot water heater beside it. Look how tall it is, even though both units have the same number of gallons! My handyman wrestled it into place by himself, it wasn’t a lot heavier than a regular hot water heater. All good now!
