Replaced the Hot Water Heater
How you know your old hot water heater is REALLY old: When it’s a Montgomery Ward brand! Heh, the only date I could find on it said something about ANSI standards of 1991. It’s a Montgomery Ward “Energy Saver 800″ SRM-33408. The sticker on it that estimates how much it costs annually to heat water says $162 / year.
On April 20th, we replaced that with a brand new GE Model SG40T12AVG ( http://products.geappliances.com/ApplProducts/Dispatcher?REQUEST=SpecPage&Sku=SG40T12AVG) from Home Depot. I chose it because of its 12 year warranty, plus the fact that it was highly rated by consumers. It cost me $588 (yikes!)
(I do subscribe to “Consumer Reports” magazine now. However, I’ve found another site to be more useful: Consumersearch.com incorporates Consumer Reports’ ratings, along with the ratings of other websites, such as Amazon.com, Epinions, CNET, and more. Another point is that Consumer Reports does NOT allow subscribers to search their content on their website. You have to pay an ADDITIONAL fee to do so.)
The installation took longer than expected, mostly because we’ve got some old galvanized fittings that had to be detached and, in some cases, replaced with copper.
What’s a bit troubling is that this new hot water heater’s energy consumption is almost TWICE what the old one was: $294 / year. (So, in 20 years, we still haven’t managed to make ALL gas hot water heaters more efficient?)
We’ll see, though. I’ve been tracking our monthly gas usage for years now. Of course, our gas bill includes not only water heating but home heating as well. Still, we’ll see if I see any “down tick” in usage.
Oh well, the old hot water heater had been leaking out of the top for weeks. I waited way too long to replace it(although nothing bad happened because of it).