Q&A: should i switch for propane hot water heater to electric hot water heater?
Posted on | June 20, 2010 | 3 Comments
Question by m t: should i switch for propane hot water heater to electric hot water heater?
we have to fix the powervent to our propane hot water heater so i was thinking maybe i should just switch over to electric. our electric bill would only go up about another 30 bucks a month and we wouldn’t have to worry about carbon monoxide…what do you think i should do?
Best answer:
Answer by Stina
Yes those are some of the pros but here where I live it is not unusual for us to lose electricity when storms come through. In the past four years we have had two major disasters and lost power for a couple days to a couple weeks. Had I not had a gas water heater I would not have had hot water and would have had one more inconvenience. Just something to consider.
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3 Responses to “Q&A: should i switch for propane hot water heater to electric hot water heater?”
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June 20th, 2010 @ 4:06 pm
Is natural gas not available in your area? if not then I would go to electric. It will not be as fast as the propane on heating up the water but should be as cheap or cheaper to run than propane.
June 20th, 2010 @ 4:43 pm
Is the hot water heater the only item in your home that uses propane. If not, then you will still have to worry about carbon monoxide.
If you switch to electric hot water heater, you will probably have to have a new electric circuit installed to supply the hot water heater. That will cost money.
In general propane is cheaper than electricity for heating. You will probably not save any money in that department. My 50 gallon electric hot water heater has a Energy Guide sticker that says it will use about $406 worth of electricity in a years time based on 8 cents per kilowatt hour. My current electric rate is 10 center per kilowatt. So my cost per month is about $42 a month. Lots of places the cost is much more than 10 cents a kilowatt
Check out the relative Energy Guide stickers for both types of heaters to see which is cheaper.
June 20th, 2010 @ 4:44 pm
It depends on whether saving money and reducing CO risks are your only goals, or whether reducing your greenhouse gas emissions matters.
Switching from propane to electric will of course reduce the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, but if you have a CO detector in each of your bedrooms, as you should, the risk from CO poisoning is already very slim (as long as the power vent is fixed properly).
You will find electric hot water a bit hard to get used to after using propane, as it takes a long time for the tank to warm up with an electric element. I don’t recommend using an electric tankless water heater because, as more and more of these heaters are added to the grid, they cause huge spikes in demand at key times (e.g. everyone’s 7am morning shower) which makes utility demand management a nightmare. They will start to price power accordingly, if they haven’t already in your area. (In Japan where on-demand electric water heaters were popular a decade or more ago, they have started offering people incentives to switch away from them towards storage water heaters, which store up heat when electricity is cheap.)
If you’re also concerned about greenhouse gas emissions – as everyone should be – then you have to consider where your electricity is coming from. If it’s coming from 100% green sources, then you’re doing the right thing by switching. But if it’s coming from coal especially, or to a lesser degree natural gas, you’ll be increasing your CO2 emissions considerably.
Propane is a combination of carbon and hydrogen, and releases CO2 and water when burned. Coal is more or less pure carbon, and reduces CO2 when burned. A coal-fired or natural gas fired power plant is usually only around 35% efficient, and you lose some of the generated electricity to transmission lines, so only about 30% of the coal heat gets turned into electricity at your 100% efficient electric heater.
A propane heater might only be 70-80% efficient but that’s still over double the efficiency of heating with coal-fired electricity, and since the propane already produces less CO2 per unit of heat output, you’ll do far better sticking with propane, in terms of CO2 emissions. Of course, you have to factor in the fossil fuels burned to deliver your propane, but propane will probably still come out ahead of heating with coal-fired electricity, in terms of your carbon footprint.