Plumbing – Will increasing the temperature of the hot water cylinder’s thermostat make the shower water supply last noticeably longer

heatinghot-waterplumbingwater-heater

I have an unvented electric immersion heater cylinder which heats the hot water for my household. The capacity is 200L and the temperature is set to 55°C.

The water heater is hard-wired to run overnight during cheaper off-peak hours only. This works reasonably well for most of the time, but occasionally during particularly heavy usage we find we run out of hot water by the evening so we're unable to take hot showers etc. at night.

If I increase the cylinder temperature to (e.g.) 65°C, will this effectively provide us with more "concentrated" hot water which will take longer to run out, assuming we continue to shower at the same comfortable temperature (~43°C)?

If yes, by how much longer might the hot water last?

Best Answer

Absolutely. It will cost you more money to run the hot water heater, but you will have usable hot water for longer. You can calculate the additional time simply as well, it's an algebra mixture problem. I hated algebra, but let's walk through the math anyway:

Let's assume your cold water is at 10°C. You want the output to be 43°C Your tank holds 200L.

Given the above, without replenishing the tank, how many L of 43°C water can you get?

 temp = (hl*ht + cl*ct) / (hl + cl)

substitute figures to solve for cl: (200*55)+(cl*10) / (200 + cl) cl= 72L of cold.

So 200L+72L = 272L of 43°C before it runs out at 55°C.

Now let's solve for 65°C: (200*65)+(cl*10) / (200 + cl) cl = 133L of cold.

So 200L+133L = 333L of 43°C before it runs out at 65°C.

Comparing 333L of hot to 272L of hot, you will get about 20-25% more hot water before it starts cooling. Of course, there's other losses; hot water cool more proportionally before the faucet, the heater looses more waste heat with hotter water, it takes longer to heat water hotter, affecting the recharge rate, etc.

Using an online cost estimator, it looks like you'll spend 33% more money to get 25% more hot water.