Hot Water Recirculation

[zeigh]

Hello,

I am curious if other Indigo users are controlling their home hot water recirculation pump with an I/O unit and the program. If so, what schedules are you using?

A standard hot water recirculation pump timer is quite limited, but with Indigo, so many options get my geek going. I have experimented with a scheduled event several times a day/week and even tried triggering the pump to run for five minutes every half hour in the day during the Summer months. I really had no idea how much of a dent that I could put in my electric bill or considered that recirculating the hot water "wicks" the temperature away from the water heater. My current schedule has dropped the average daily electrical usage for the home by 8 kWh! For my family and larger home, that is almost 10% of our daily usage! As they say, "your milage may vary".

The next step is to implement motion sensors by each sink and refine the usage even more...

[Dual]

My house in Arizona had a recirculating pump running 24/7 when I bought it. The built-in timer was unused. With an electric hot water tank I found the recirculating pump was costing me more than 1 kWh. Over $50 a month! I installed a relay on the hot water tank controlled by a Z-Wave Smart Plug so I could turn the power to the tank off using Indigo. I connected the circulating pump to a second Z-Wave Smart Plug. The hot water tank is now shut off between 11 pm and 6 am. I installed a motion sensor in the kitchen. Whenever there is motion in the kitchen the circulating pump turns on. The kitchen is the only area that is far enough away from the hot water tank to require the circulating pump. If I had other areas I could install additional motion sensors.


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[Sevilsivle]

We have the circulation pump connected to a z-wave switch. There is a button in each bathroom and the kitchen. When hot water is needed pressing the button starts the pump and a 5 minute timer. It actually only takes around 3 minutes for hot water to become available. Due to the size of the house and the fact that the pipes also cross the courtyard to an outbuilding, the amount of heat dissapated by the system was the main reason for doing this. As there are only 2 of us this works well for us.

[MartinG]

I do this.

Indigo enables/disables a z-wave switch according to a combination of schedules and presence (from fing plugin).

Our circuit provides hot water to hot water taps/showers/baths and (gently) heated towel rails in the bathrooms.

By default the pump runs early morning to late evening, unless there's nobody at home, in which case it switches off.

Very simple, and nobody else in the household has noticed.