Long Wait Time For Hot Water

Over the past 23 years of being a plumber, I have been asked, an uncountable number of times, “Why does it take forever to get hot water to my shower, kitchen sink, bathroom”, so on and so forth.

If it takes 30 seconds or more to get hot water to any fixture in your home; that’s too long.

A common misconception is installing a tankless water heater will not get it there faster, this is not true. Hot water is still coming from the same location and distance

So, you turn on a faucet and want hot water. Your water heater may be 75 plus feet or more away from the fixture. The cooled or cold water in that pipe needs to be ran out before you get hot water from the water heater tank or tankless hot water heater. Depending on the size of the pipe and the flow rate of the faucet this could take up to 3 to 5 minutes.

I’ve had customers tell me, “I turn on my shower, go downstairs and make a cup of coffee and come back and it’s just getting hot.” WOW, what a waste of precious water and money. I’ve also been out to customers’ homes who say my dishwasher is junk it doesn’t clean my dishes. While they are telling me this, I have the kitchen faucet running on the hot side to see how long it takes to get hot water. Most of the time its 2 or 3 minutes. Newer dishwashers are very energy efferent and use very little water per cycle. If it takes 2 to 3 minutes to get hot water to the kitchen sink faucet which is where the dishwasher feed line is. Your first cycle of dish washing is probably with cold water. Unless you have a very high-end unit that boost the water temperature.

OK, you get the picture, let’s talk about the simple solution.

A hot water re-circulation pump. Some large houses are plumbed for it and when the pump fails people don’t want to spend the money to replace it. Most of the time though I find that the home was never plumbed for one. Don’t worry, I can install a Watts, Grundfos Comfort System, or a Metland system.

Hot water re-circulation is basically creating a loop from the hot water heater to each faucet and back to the hot water heater. Therefore, when you turn on a fixture for hot water very little cooled water must be wasted before you get the hot water you want.

The Watts and Grundfos system work by installing the pump on the hot side of the water heater. A manifold tee that opens and closes if placed under the most distant fixture from the water heater. It pushes the cooled water back to the water heater using the cold-water line. Once the manifold tee senses hot water it closes. Most of the time it takes 10 to 15 seconds max. to have hot water at any fixture

However, if there are areas in the home that do not get covered by one manifold tee additional ones can be purchased and installed.