{"id":2022,"date":"2019-03-07T14:18:22","date_gmt":"2019-03-07T22:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/?p=2022"},"modified":"2019-03-07T14:18:22","modified_gmt":"2019-03-07T22:18:22","slug":"re-circulation-pump-timer-old-school-vs-new-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/2019\/03\/07\/re-circulation-pump-timer-old-school-vs-new-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-circulation pump timer – old school vs new school"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our house has only one water heater for the entire place.\u00a0 It is a (pretty big) 75 gallon unit in the basement.<\/p>\n

To avoid wasting water by having to run the water to get it hot, we have two circulation loops in the house.\u00a0 Being very long loops, they take quite a while to circulate the water and get it hot at the farthest location.\u00a0 Because of low pressure at the street, some of our inside water lines are quite large (1 1\/2″ or 2″, I forget).\u00a0 This means the volume of water we are moving around with the recirculating pump is rather large.<\/p>\n

If heat loss wasn’t an issue, I’d just leave the recirculating pump running 24\/7.\u00a0 But alas, it is an issue.\u00a0 Even with our hot water lines insulated with the standard insulation, it actually burns up quite a bit of natural gas keeping the water hot all around the house.<\/p>\n

The trick then becomes a balancing act between wasting natural gas, or wasting water.\u00a0 Both cost money.<\/p>\n

The natural solution is to put a timer on the re-circulation pump, so that it only runs when you are likely to use the water.\u00a0 Some pumps come with such a time integrated in.\u00a0 A standard timer<\/a> looks like this<\/p>\n

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But there are some downsides.\u00a0 You have to guess a schedule for timer like this.\u00a0 We usually shower at 7 am and \/ or 6 pm, so I’ll set the timer to run from 6 am to 7 am, and 5 pm to 6 pm.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you guess wrong, or your schedule changes on any particular day, you are wasting gas and wasting water.<\/p>\n

Leaving on vacation?\u00a0 Then I have to go down to our basement and unplug the timer.\u00a0 Coming back from vacation?\u00a0 No chance the shower water will be hot, because I have to plug in the timer first.<\/p>\n

I found a better solution recently, a WeMo timer<\/a>.\u00a0 I guess this qualifies as a smart plug.<\/p>\n

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The nice thing about this is that, in addition to being able to set a schedule just like the analog timer, I can get around some of the downsides I mentioned above.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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– For vacation I can disable the schedule and re-enable it before I come home.<\/div>\n
– If our schedule changes, I start the timer at another time, or stop the normal schedule from running.<\/div>\n
– I don’t have to go down into the basement for any of this.<\/div>\n
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I can also easily check to see if the re-circulation pump is currently running.<\/div>\n
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I think the next step will be to get some of these for some of the stand-alone lights we have in the house.\u00a0 While in theory we can set a vacation schedule for lights through our Lutron Homeworks QS system, I haven’t figured that out yet.\u00a0 Setting up some lamps on these WeMo timers is very simple and easy to control from anywhere.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our house has only one water heater for the entire place.\u00a0 It is a (pretty big) 75 gallon unit in the basement. To avoid wasting water by having to run the water to get it hot, we have two circulation loops in the house.\u00a0 Being very long loops, they take quite a while to circulateRead more about Re-circulation pump timer – old school vs new school<\/span>[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conservation","category-plumbing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2025,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions\/2025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}