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Within the past 30 years, residential construction in the western states has exhibited a trend toward placing hot water heaters farther away from where people actually use the hot water. The result? Water is wasted when the user opens the tap to clear out the cold water in the lines and get the hot water flowing from the fixture.
It is not just an issue of water conservation. There is also the concern that a valuable resource is being put into the sanitary sewer system, where energy is then used to treat the water before discharging it in a cleaned state. There is also the energy that the homeowner's hot water heater uses to heat the very cold water that is replenishing the water being drawn from it. Assuming that a person waits a minute for hot water to come out of a tap, a four-person household could waste approximately 16,000 gallons of water each year.
"Because water heaters have been moved farther away from the fixtures that they serve, and hot water supply lines generally aren't insulated, it takes much longer to get hot water out of the tap," said Larry Acker, chief operating officer of ACT Metlund Systems in Costa Mesa, Calif. "We're also running piping under slabs, which makes a perfect heat sink, as well as running piping overhead, so water is cold in winter and warmer than you want in summer."
Acker pointed out that the issue is simply to...