I was wondering how much a typical home spends on hot water?  How much could you save with low flow showers?  It seems to me that you could save money just with a holding tank to warm the water to room temperature.  This would certainly save money in the summer.

Conservation, especially where there is no loss of utility, is the best way to save energy and money. The more I look at hot water, the more I realize we have very little idea how much we use. I will provide an estimating worksheet with my post next week on SDHW, but even then it is just an estimate. The use of hot water is very variable. The McDaniels (two) use 3,000 gallons a year. I estimate our family of four uses 13,000 gallons a year. NYSERDA and other estimators show families of four use up to 25,000 gallons a year. Gallons used is different than gallons needed! Certainly you can use a lot less with Energy Star front-loading clothes washer that are designed to clean with cold water. Also with low-flow shower heads - Greg Pedick, NYSERDA Shell Specialist, showed a shower head in a presentation last week that used only .25 gallons per minute. I could not find one that low, but did find several that used as little as .5 GPM. That is less than half as much as our 10 year-old low-flow shower head uses, which is quite good at 1.25 GPM. Now, I’d hate to take a cold shower, but certainly your clothes don’t mind. I agree with you Dave, the first step to savings is to cut your use and there are a lot of ways you can reduce your use of hot water.

It would be very interesting to know what the potential energy savings are. I have no idea what I spend on hot water every year. I did buy a high efficiency gas hot water heater but have no idea how much it saved me or how much more I could save.
What would be very helpful for me or anyone else interested in saving money and reducing our dependence on foreign energy would be an analysis of what my potential benefits might be. Where are the biggest benefits? Where should I start?

Glad you asked. It used to be that getting a home energy audit was a great place to start, but because the audits are now free to the homeowner, contractors usually can’t afford to do an independent and thorough assessment. Hey, but go ahead they are free, just realize it is part of a sales process. Hopefully this will change soon. In the meantime, I am preparing two tools that will help people get started: Energy Usage Worksheet and a Hot Water Usage Estimator. The first will be posted tomorrow (weather permitting) with my post on “Start Here!” and the second will be posted Tues with “My SDHW System Results” Over the next months and years we will post a lot of specific direction for people to save energy and we will refer them to other sites that are helpful as well.