The recirculating pump brings instantaneous hot water
While many of us would love to claim; otherwise, most of us can’t handle using cold water in our homes, especially when it comes to taking a bath. After all, using hot water to take a shower is one of the most heavenly feelings a person can experience and can never compare to a standard cold shower. Taking a cold shower is pretty uncomfortable, and we’ve all had days when we couldn’t even stand to run our hands under it, let alone take a bath in it.
But that raises a problem. The conventional water heating system works by having an external heating unit that heats water and then pumps the hot water to different fixtures around the house. However, since the fixtures in the bathroom, etc. are too far away for the hot water to travel instantly when we open the taps.
Almost all of us have been guilty of opening the hot water tap and letting the cold water already in the pipe run out first before being replaced by hot water from the heating system. True, you can’t always be expected to start using the cold water if it’ll eventually get hot, especially in the colder seasons, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of water is wasted during this time. Water that need not necessarily have been wasted if you’d installed a recirculation system.
How recirculating pumps can help
The purpose of recirculating pumps is to eliminate the cold water present in the pipes before the hot water tap is turned on so that when you do arrive to use it, turning the hot water tap on immediately provides you with hot water for use.
The way this works is that the pump automatically pumps cold water in the delivery pipe to a second return pipeline (recirculation pipe) that feeds back the cold water to the heating system. The cold water is pumped from the delivery pipe gets replaced by the hot water from the heating system, and the cold water is reheated once it cycles back through the hot water recirculation pump, ensuring no water is wasted at the end.
Using a recirculation pump to achieve this not only lets you the user have hot water present in your pipes whenever you need it, but it ends up saving quite a lot of water. These savings are compounded the more massive the scale of your water system is since the more significant the house is, the further away your fixtures are from the heating system, and the more the cold water would be needed to be wasted if a recirculation system wasn’t installed. Granted, running the recirculation pump in the first place does have its own energy cost, but this investment is doubled in returns from how much water you end up saving at the end of the day.
Setting up a recirculating pump
There are two core components to a recirculation system: the recirculation pump and the return pipeline. Setting up both these components is necessary for the system to work. The pump can easily be attached to the return pipeline, and since all these pumps are electric powered, setting up a power socket isn’t too had of a task. Setting up a return pipeline, however, can be quite a challenge, since t usually entails installing an entirely new piping system to all hot water fixtures, something which is neither easy or cheap to pull off.
Still, there is a way around this problem if you use the already installed cold water line to push the unneeded cold water out of the hot water pipeline. You’d still save water from being wasted and would save yourself the trouble of having to install a new pipe altogether.
Making your system smarter and more efficient
The final step to installing a recirculating pump is to figure out how you can install an even more efficient system. Since you don’t need hot water 24 hours a day, most pumps today come with timers to help you set when they should be active.
Some pump seven come up with built-in temperature sensors that stop the pump once all the cold water has been pumped out, saving even more energy. Different models offer different features, so this site offers an in-depth comparison between all the popular models to help you choose one that’s just right for you.
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