Water heater advice

daveybuk

This is where I reveal myself to be seriously stupid....

I have an electric tank water heater. It's attached to a timer which I usually have set to twice a day. Recently I haven't been home much, so I set the timer to 'off'.

However, I was really surprised to find that, three days on, I still seemed to have as much piping hot water as usual... if not more.

Just looked again and found a separate mains switch for the water heater.

Now I'm confused. By switching off the timer and leaving the mains switch on, have I actually been losing money by heating water all the time? How do I get around this?

Cheers.

Deleerious

Hi Davey.

The heating element in the cylinder will have a stat on it. Usually set to 60 degrees which is about right for domestic water temperature. This means when the water reaches 60 degrees, it stops heating (to prevent scaulding and boileing over into it's header tank). The element obviously has had a permanent live feed to it meaning it was on all the time however, It would have only been heating the water in the cylinder when it the water dropped below 55 degrees so depending on how well insulated your cylinder is will depend on how much money you have been wasting.

As for how you get round it? You need to find out whether the timer is actually in the loop which seemingly it isn't.

I would suggest get your friendly spark around to decypher what you have installed and he'll wire the timer in there to make it fully automated. It may be worth spending a bit of £££ to get a digital one that you can alter for when you are in / out of the house.

Deleerious D

notbritishgas

You can trace the flexible cable that comes from the immersion heater, this will be situated on the top of the hot water cylinder.
See if the cable goes into your timer or straight to the mains switch which will normally have a neon on it and a flex coming out of it.
The normal arrangement is for a cable to come out of the mains switch into the timer and then a cable from the timer to the heater.
Hope this helps.

daveybuk

Cheers for the advice.

I have now reverted to having the time set to 'twice a day', and - if me and my partner both have a long shower, for instance - the hot water now runs out.

Seems to me that that is how it should be, so I guess I'll leave it like that. If I go away for a few days or more, I'll just switch the tank off completely.