Hot Water Recirculation System

In the paragraphs to follow, when I say “…if it were up to me…”, please realize what I mean is that if I were making decisions on a new house being built, or if the water heater failed and needed replacing, or if any-number-of-other-circumstances meant that it wouldn’t be wasteful to discard appliances and/or fixtures which are currently working just fine. Big if.

That having been said… if it were up to me, I would not have a large tank water heater. It would not be electric. It would likely be a pair of tankless, natural gas, instant-on water heaters; one near the North end of the house where it would supply the downstairs and upstairs bathrooms (their directly above/below each other), and another in the (South end) laundry room to supply the clothes washer, the dish washer and kitchen sink directly above the laundry room. Even though the pipes are insulated, it’s the long (East-facing rambler) run from North to South in a cold basement that has caused us to run countless gallons of water down the kitchen drain waiting for the water to get hot.

But – an inexpensive and easy compromise for the time being is a Hot Water Recirculation System. I just installed one today. It was one of the easier plumbing jobs I’ve done, involved only two minor thumb injuries (nearly no blood), and a total cost under $200. I watched a couple videos online of people describing their installation of this very same unit, and although they only needed about an hour, and needed zero to two parts beyond what came in the box, in both cases it looked like their house was built decades more recently than this house. Stuff was easier to get to. Hookups were flexible tubing at both ends.

Mine would need more parts, and more trips to Home Depot. Oh well.

So the idea is that if all of the hot faucets in the house could begin deploying water warm enough to wash one’s hands within several seconds (rather than a full minute at full open), less water is wasted. And presumably, it is more energy efficient to allow the water in the hot-side pipes to cool to room temp during the times we’re extremely unlikely to need any hot water. So we have three hour-long periods of please-pre-heat-the-pipes established. Getting ready for work in the morning, dinner and dishwasher time, and getting-ready-for-bed time.

After we use it like this for a while, we may adjust those start/stop times. We may even find we only need two periods.

The “normal” way to install this crossover is to put it under the kitchen sink. The (assumedly) flexible supply hoses that go from the under-sink shut-offs to the kitchen faucet are connected instead to the “out” connections of this crossover. Then two new flexible supply lines go from the shut-offs to the “in” connections. In our case, I lucked out. There used to be a non-code-compliant shower in the laundry room. So there were overhead hot and cold supply lines with big 1/2″ copper and union connections. I cut the pipes above the unions, and put on brass compression fittings. Larger “supply” than usual, but it worked, and it’s only another six feet of pipe to the kitchen faucet from here. Close enough. Then I merely capped off the “hot out” and “cold out” supply connections on the crossover. That’s the white PVC caps you see in the photo above.

I figured if any of these new connections was going to leak, it would be the galvanized (dielectric plastic insert inside it) nipple that went into the tank. No sign of trouble there yet.

But this one – above the pump, top end of the flexible hot supply, this one took the most torque to get it to quit dripping. I suspect it’s related to how deeply the stamped the lettering is along the side of the copper. You know… so that I know that it’s copper (and what size it is). The half-inch stuff at the other end either wasn’t stamped, or I lucked into an un-stamped area. Whatever the reason, it took a lot less torque than this one.

Here we go again… but if it were up to me, something like this would be required in every home West of the Rockies. And no, you can’t have a golf-fairway-like lawn if you live in a place that nature has decided should be desert. No irrigation for vanity – only for growing food. But this is just one in a very long list of reasons that California (and the other Western states) would never want me to be their king.

The great thing about this is that I didn’t do it in order to choose personal suffering for environmental reasons. Rather, it was a situation where my convenience AND saving natural resources align nicely. I’d rather not waste time nor water nor money waiting for the water to heat up at the sink.