Whenever its my turn to buy in the pub I go to the toilets,also I rummage through my neighbours dustbins to find any left over food,plus I eat my own fecal matter.
Buying stamps online may be convenient, but the Postal Service charges $1.00 to deliver them, so it’s not quite “free.” On the other hand, it’s a flat charge per order, so it’s the same no matter how much postage you purchase.
I plugged the TV and DVD player into a power strip which I turn off when neither of these electronic devices is in use. I don’t care if the TV loses time on it’s internal clock.
I wank only to solar-powered porn.
I killed a family in an Escalade.
I use a power strip with stand-by appliances and turn it off when they aren’t in use.
All laundry is only washed in cold water.
I invented a perpetual motion tv.
I tapped into my neighbor’s electricity.
I cook by rubbing ingredients together really fast.
I sleep on top of cars that are going in the general direction I need to go tomorrow.
I have a regenerative brake built into my butt-wiping hand.
I saved 15% or more on my car insurance by switching to GEICO.
My garage is within the footprint of the house i.e there is occupied space above it - it isn’t stuck on the side of the house.
Therefore, putting two nice hot cars in there and closing the garage door pumps about a billion BTUs into the house that the AC has to remove.
Later on at night, the cars have cooled down - the engines and the interiors are not hot.
GEICO, Progressive, State Farm, Allstate, etc. – they all say that people who switched saved money with them. So who were people insuring with before that cost so much?
I dropped all my magazine subscriptions except Entertainment Weekly, and I only kept that because I can get it through Amazon for $15 a year.
No newspaper delivery.
Compact bulbs as the regular bulbs burn out.
Turned off the second refrigerator – I noticed a $10 monthly saving.
Do all banking and bill paying on line.
Switched to pay-as-you-go cell phone.
I’d be able to do a lot more if I lived alone, but my husband won’t cooperate, especially with the thermostat, and with turning off lights and the TV.
you are not saving energy by doing this and likely using more.
the water heater is constantly loosing heat to the room. if turned off then it cools to room temperature (if left long enough) and you have to heat the water again. it also takes more heat to bring water from cold to hot then to maintain it at hot. all the heat lost you have to later replace. turning off might save energy if you are gone for something like maybe a week (actual time would require doing calculations).
best is to buy an insulating blanket to wrap around the heater and install it following directions. this keeps more the the heat energy you have used in the tank where you want it.
Can you tell me why flipping the switch (and it’s a switch, not a fuse) will put years of extra wear on the circuit breaker? I don’t want to do something that’s going to ruin something in the house, but I’d like to have more info just the same.
And what is the difference between heating water using a timer versus heating it by flipping a switch? (Cost wise, that is.) Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t seem like it would impact the total cost of heating the water in a water tank by using a timer–still doing the same thing.
timers on water heaters are used where there is a day and night differential pricing. it is priced cheaper at night so the timer can be set to only heat the water at night. you need an electric meter and account from the utility to provide for that.
running the heater on timer or switch otherwise makes no difference. if the water cools you need to reheat it later with greater energy usage.
best to keep the heat in the tank with more insulation.
I broke up with my financially-irresponsible boyfriend. So not only am I paying less for water, electricity, and gas, I’m spending a third what I used to on groceries and I’m doing half as much laundry in our building’s coin-operated machines. I’m no longer paying his cell phone bill, DirecTV will be canceled, and should I travel anywhere in the future, that’s only one plane ticket I’ll have to pay for. Not to mention the NSF fees I no longer need to provide a cushion against when he overdraws his account.
I can’t quantify the savings just yet, as it’s only been a month, but it’ll be significant.
Can’t say I recommend this for everyone, though. 
I thought from your description that you were using the breaker itself as a switch, and turning it on and off twice a day. That is bad for a circuit breaker, and will wear it out early. If you are using an actual switch, that’s OK. (Though why there would be a switch in a water heater circuit is odd – many places, this would be a code violation.)
There is still the question of whether this is actually saving any money. That depends on how fast your hot water tank loses heat into the house, vs. how fast the heater can again bring the water hot enough for you to use, and how much energy that takes. I think that the suggestion of an insulating blanket around the tank, to reduce the amount of energy needed to maintain the hot water as hot is likely to be better.
I don’t believe this is physically possible, actually.
Leaving aside other extraneous questions (price of nighttime heating versus daytime, wear and tear on the circuit breaker etc), consider just the bare consequences of keeping it hot vs heating it up again.
Lets say your tank full of water is at 50C at 8 in the morning as you leave for work, and you want it to be 50C again at 6 when you get back.
You’ve got 2 possibilities - keep it at 50C all day, or let it drop back to wherever-it-gets-to (say 30C) and heat it back up again.
In the course of the day, there will be heat lost from the tank to the outside air. Because you want to have exactly the same temperature when you get back, you must replace exactly and only the heat energy lost from the tank to the outside world.
So, in order to minimise costs, the one and only thing you need to do is minimise the heat loss from your tank. Obviously, having the best insulated tank you possibly can is your number one best strategy here. But next after that, since the rate of heat loss is proportional to the difference between the tank temperature and the air temperature, keeping the tank temperature high is going to lead to continuous high heat loss over the whole day, and hence high costs. Letting the temperature drop towards outside temperature minimises your heat loss, and minimises costs.
The calculation is exactly the same whether you leave for a week or two hours. It’s always better, from a purely heat loss perspective, to heat up the water just before you need it, rather than keep it hot.
you need to do some actual thermodynamic calculations to find that it takes less energy to keep it hot than to reheat it in the single day timeframe. or try to find out experimentally.
there is a difference in heating water in bulk and ‘on demand’. if instead of a tank heater you used a demand heater you would save energy but costs aren’t necessarily saved depending on energy costs, heater costs.
Happy to, if it makes my point clearer.
Lets say we have a tank X litres big. The desired water temperature is T1, the outside air is T2. Here are the assumptions I’m going to make:
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The amount of energy taken to heat a body of water by a single degree is independent of the starting temperature of the water. It takes the same energy (and hence the same cost) to raise the water from 20 to 21 as from 49 to 50.
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Simplifying assumption: your electric heater works by monitoring the temperature continuously, and switching itself on when the temperature drops by 1 degree, at which point it turns on and heats until the required temperature is reached again.
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The rate of heat lost is directly proportional to the difference between the water and air temperatures. So if the heater loses N joules in one minute if the temperature difference is 40 degrees, then it would lose N/2 joules in one minute if the temperature difference is 20 degrees.
So, lets start our virtual experiment. Lets look at scenario one: The heater is always on.
At start, our body of water is at T1, and the outside air is at temperature T2.
After t minutes, it’s dropped a degree. The heater kicks in, and pumps in N joules, at a cost of C dollars.
Note that at this point, it’s back in its initial state. So after another t minutes, the water will drop exactly one degree again, we will need to add another N joules, and pay C dollars.
So this is generalizable. If you have the heater on and use no water, after any period of time kt* you will have pumped in *kN joules, and cost yourself *kC dollars
Now for scenario two - you turn off the heater.
At start, our body of water is at T1, and the outside air is at temperature T2.
After t minutes, it’s dropped a degree. The heater is off, so it does nothing.
After 2t minutes, it’s dropped … well, not quite another degree. At the start of the second time period, the water temperature was a little cooler, so obviously in the second t minutes the water loses a little less heat than it did in the first t minutes. In fact, the amount of heat lost is:
N((T1-1)-T2)/(T1-T2)
And the new temperature is:
T1 -[1] - [((T1-1)-T2)/(T1-T2)] {first square brackets is heat lost in the first t minutes, second square bracket is heat lost in the next t minutes
which equals:
T1-2+(1/(T1-T2))
In other words, in time 2t the temperature has fallen slightly less than two degrees.
If we were to turn the heater back on right now, after only missing one heating period, the amount of heat we’d need to pump in is N*(2-(1/(T1-T2))). That’s less than the 2N we would have pumped in at this point if the heater was on and constantly bringing the temperature back to T1. Obviously if you go on to times 3t and 4t and 5t the effect becomes even more pronounced, but the basic principle is the same.
Note that there are almost no raw numbers in the above scenario. It’s totally generalizable. It doesn’t matter what sort of heater you have. It’s always more efficient in heating costs to let it cool down till you need it, than to keep it hot.
i would suspect that if switching a bulk(tank) water heater off for a part of a day would work in practice to save energy or money then they would be made with a timer to over ride the thermostat. it would be a big selling feature.
i think that energy costs and wear on the heater (frequent large temperature changes) cause it not to be effective.
Not necessarily. First, it would need to be a complex programmable timer to account for weekends, that’s expensive and could increase the cost of a water heater by 10%. Then, you still need to actively manage the timer on holidays and vacation days, so that you don’t accidentally wind up with cold showers or no hot water for your laundry.
While I acknowledge that turning the heater off WILL save energy cost, I’m dubious about the total amount of energy saved. Modern water heaters are pretty well insulated. Insulation, while not reversing the energy savings, will reduce them, potentially to the point of saving only pennies a day, for the risk of having no hot water when you need it.
even clock motor timers can accommodate only weekday use. electronic timers less a problem. any timer could have a manual over ride for holiday use that need not be programmed.
i wouldn’t guess on the timer cost now or decades ago but i would expect it would be offered if it would have a payback within half the lifetime of the header.
good point about not having hot water when you need it. you could wait maybe two hours for a large water heater to come to temperature. if you manually switched the heater on you would be without hot water for that time, if you used a timer to switch it on earlier then your off time is lessened.
Ohmygod. My worst nightmare has come true! My thread turned into an algebraic equation! AAAGGGHHHH!:eek:
I started a compost heap in my cubicle.