Water Heater Pollution?

Question

How do I figure out how much CO2 and CO my water heater is producing. I want to figure out the environmental impact of a gas burning water heater.

I'm trying to put an example together that shows if 100 water heaters were changed out for tankless on demand water heaters that would be same as removing X number of cars from the road. Hope that makes sense.

This is for a plumbing company marketing piece.

bellowsplumbing.com

Answer 1

Sounds like a nice homework question. Why not confess and actually tell us it is for school. You might have better luck at getting an answer.pp

Answer 2

well i can think of a few ways... but to measure directly... i dont know. it's quite tricky because, if i understand it correctly, you need to take into account the entire usage over the day or month or year, to compare your on-demand heater versus the hot water tank style heater. right?

for that you need to start getting data... fortunately there is probably a lot available for american households on how much hot water they use (some dept of statistics) and the 'average' size tank, and normal settings.. (maybe from a rival, hot water tank company!) and their energy efficiency (especially how much energy is wasted by heating a whole tank). and then you can work out the amount of gas they use in a year...

then you'd want to measure your product's efficiency, and use that to work out how much energy/gas your average american household would use with your product...


it's probably gonna take some work, but at least your data and claims would be believable, reliable and, most importantly, honest (i say that because nobody should have a good reason to sue you for false information)



Having said that, someone may have worked a lot of that out for you......!

Answer 3

you will need to determine how big the burner is for the water heater in BTU. Then you will need to make some kind of estimate of the amount of gas or oil that will be used per hour-

to estimate the amount of gas used- wait until the water is hot- then take a shower or bath and time how long the burner runs to Reheat the water- this times the number of baths will be for bath water heat- wait by the hot water heater until it comes on twice to estimate the amount of burner time to keep the water hot- this will allow you to multiply this amount of fuel used by an air emission factor to determine the amount of pollutants that will be emitted. this is a very rough estimate, but good enough to illustrate how small changes can have huge impacts.

go the EPA site- air link- then go to ap42 index- next go to external combustion- then to the type of fuel used- it will explain it very well-

the factor for residential furnaces for CO emissions is 40 lbs of CO per million cubic feet of natural gas consumed-

you will not find a CO2 number as it is not a pollutant of concern for air permits-

you will find a long list of pollutants such as lead that you can calculate that are related to burning natural gas.

good luck