The Future of Water Heating

What you'll find on this page: There are ideas out there being developed and implemented that will profoundly affect anybody who uses hot water, and there are people busy having those ideas. This is an effort to acquaint you with both.

Most people who visit this site are just average Americans or Canadians with a problem to be solved. It might not occur to them that behind the scenes, there are people actively trying to improve the breed of water heaters. You might call them water-heating elites, but without the pejorative connotation that sometimes goes with "elites" -- that being somebody who is better than the rest of us. Instead, you might think of them as experts in the field who are vitally interested in making water-heating more satisfactory and more efficient for the rest of us.

Some of them are in the water heater manufacturing industry. Others work for utilities. Still others are environmentalists. But this area is outside the realm of politics, even though that tends to tinge everything anyway. People do like to take sides and argue!

These people are trying to make a difference by making better, more efficient products and developing more efficient concepts, and not arguing among themselves, but discussing among themselves. If doing a thing a little differently results in a vastly more efficient system, how can anyone argue against that, be they Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green?

This section will comprise essays by these people, and links to presentations they've made in other venues. In the spring of 2011, I attended the Affordable Comfort Summit in San Francisco, and the ACEEE Hot Water Forum in Berkeley, and heard a lot of ideas that I think need broader exposure to the general public. ACEEE stands for American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

I learned a long time ago that even great ideas have to be sold, and that the essence of grass-roots is making people aware of the ideas they should get behind. Otherwise, those ideas will remain in the shadows instead of being implemented, as they should be.

I skipped the 2013 and 2016 Hot Water Forums and one wasn't held in 2014. The latest entries are from this year's, held remotely because of covid.

Essays

The Future of Water Heating: What's Possible -- Larry Weingarten explores where we've been and where we might go.

Simple Solar Water Heating -- Larry Weingarten proposes an inexpensive system.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? -- Larry Weingarten discusses the dangers of increasingly complex systems.

Decarbonization -- Some concerned about climate change are actively trying to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.

Decarbonization, Larry Weingarten's Take -- Larry favors this trend and tells why.

Hot Water Forums

-- Randy Schuyler

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