electric water heater [RE-wrenches]

[Tom Simko]

 An electric water heater CAN make sense in an off grid home. I noticed this
winter that most times when my thermal system falls behind demand, it was
windy, thus I'd have an excess of power thanks to my wind turbines output
combined with my PV array. (H-80,  recently replaced by a AWP 3.6). So... I
bought a 20 gallon 120 VAC water heater from the Depot (less then 200 bucks)
and judicious use of the watt eater has served me well as a backup. By no
means is it a  main source of hot water, but combined with my stainless wood
boiler which is also plumbed into the 20 gallon tank, it gives me a quick
and free (propane was well over a buck a gallon this winter) source of hot
water. Plus its fun to mention to other knowledgeable off gridders I use an
electric water heater! I'd never go this route for a customer however, as
you must ride herd on the 85 amp plus power draw pretty carefully, it better
be windy and stay windy while in use to make it a reasonable load.

Tom Simko
Skyline Solar 

on 4/9/03 2:35 PM, Jeff Yago at jryago at earthlink.net wrote:

> 
> "I think it is humorous that she chose to install a six thousand dollar
> inverter dedicated to run a hot water heater, just so that she doesn't have
> to change over to propane.  When the hot water heater gets older, we intend
> to change it over to propane..."
> 
> Although I would never use a pv system to power an electric hot water heater
> due to the very high load, resulting short battery run time, and this is
> much more expensive than any other way to heat water,  if you are looking
> for a temporary solution until the heater is replaced, why not:
> 
> Replace 240 AC heating elements with DC elements
> Install a load controller with adj. low voltage cut-off
> Power hot water heater DC elements directly from battery bank (no AC
> conversion losses).
> Use inverter only to power "normal" lighting and appliance loads in house.
> 
> Just my 2 cents,
> 
> Jeff Yago
> 
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