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Hybrid water heater pays you to save energy
GE's new hybrid water heater, the GeoSpring, is almost free with city and federal rebates and will save the average homeowner $186 per year.
Fri, Jul 16 2010 at 9:01 PM
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Energy Efficiency, Go Green

Photo: GE

It surprises most people to know that nearly 20 percent of home energy use is attributed to making hot water, costing the average U.S. household about $300 per year (PDF). While conventional gas heaters fair a bit better in energy use than their electric counterparts (about one-third of American homes use electricity to make hot water), both are hugely inefficient.
 
GE is hoping to capitalize on this major market opportunity by replacing old inefficient hot water waters with its new GeoSpring — a super hi-tech electric hot water heater that uses a heat pump to capture heat from the ambient air. A compressor concentrates that captured heat, reducing the amount of energy required to get the water to temperature by 62 percent.
 
I ran the numbers ... there are 80 million single-family homes in the U.S., and homeowners spend about $24 billion annually on hot water heating, generating an estimated 192 millions tons of CO2 (a typical home generates 12 tons of CO2 per year for energy use, 2.4 tons just for water heating). Theoretically, if the homeowner of every single-family home swapped out his old inefficient water heaters with a super-efficient water heater like GeoSpring, American families would save about $15 billion per year (how's that for an economic stimulus?) while eliminating 119 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year for the life of the unit.
 
The only problem is cost. The GeoSprings are not cheap, but right now thanks to energy stimulus grants, there are some really amazing rebates in place through the end of the year. If you are lucky enough to live in Tallahassee, your $480 federal credit can be paired with a $1,200 local rebate, completely offsetting the $1,600 sticker price.
 
One of the reasons I'm optimistic that the U.S. can do it's part to reduce global carbon emissions far in excess of the meager reduction proposed in the current clean energy bill, is that our building infrastructure is rife with wasted energy, the "low hanging fruit" as energy efficiency geeks call it. And major companies like GE are jumping in to help consumers make massive nationwide reductions like this one not only possible, but attractive.
 
Even without the government incentives, the investment of a GeoSpring would pay for itself in less than eight years through energy savings, and the remaining 20-30 years of the device's life would save that homeowner an additional $3,000 and cut the home's carbon footprint by 8-12 percent annually.
 
I would say that definitely counts as a bright idea.

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Comments: 3
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anonymous
AL RAYMOND Jan 11 2011 at 5:26 AM
We recently replaced a old standard 40 gallon electric water heater (worked great until it died) with the new GE Geospring Hybrid 50 gallon. The unit was installed professionally, in an unnvented 7 ft x 4 ft X 9 ft pantry. We started out in the default hybrid mode at 120 degrees. We found that we could barely get a bathtub of hot water. We switched over to the “high demand mode”, and even after increasing the setting to 130 degrees, there still was barely enough hot water for one bath. We noted
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that when we ran hot water at the tap (5 feet from tank) it was consistently 10 degrees cooler than the water temperature setting (e.g. tank set for 130 degrees, water at tap 120 degrees). We called GE and they arranged for a service call. We live in rural Florida, and the man they sent was not familiar with the hybrid, but brought a printout of diagnostic tests for the unit. After about thirty minutes, he pronounced that the unit passed all of the tests. He offered that we might not be getting the volume of warm air in the pantry to allow the heat pump to extract and exchange to the tank water. To test this theory, I placed a ceramic type electric heater in the pantry near the units air intake. This made no perceptible difference in performance. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?
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anonymous
Steven Harbauer Jul 26 2010 at 10:46 AM

First, spelling error: capture heat from the ambient art - should be air...
And how would this help where we have natural gas (NG) service and have NG water heaters?

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anonymous
Gene Haynes Jul 25 2010 at 6:23 AM
I am looking for customer testimonials that show before-and-after electric bills. I do water heater research, and so far no articles about hybrids have appeared except promotion blurbs. If customers suddenly noticed a drop in their electric bill, somebody would be shouting and the country would erupt in cheer. The facts are: the promise of saving more than a dollar or two a month from hybrid water heaters is unrealistic unless the unit is run in full-hybrid mode > which causes slow recovery and
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is dependent on warm incoming water > which implies less hot water consumption especially in winter > which implies the consumer would do better with a smaller, cheaper, heavily-insulated water heater, on a timer, that is supported by a staging-or-tempering tank, and wired with off-peak thermostats so only the top portion of tank has warm water. Show us the money. The product registration has an address known by the company >> and a company with integrity can invite their customers to participate.
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