On Tuesday, June 3, 2014 9:03:08 AM UTC-4, trader_4 wrote:
On Tuesday, June 3, 2014 12:15:57 AM UTC-4, Jim Joyce wrote:

We recently bought a new house that has dual 50-gallon electric water



heaters. Each heater has a single 5500 Watt heating element.







The 'problem' is that there are only two of us living in the house, and we



very likely don't need 100 gallons of hot water standing by. The electric



bill is out of control, and we're thinking the dual water heaters are a



chunk of that.







The two heaters appear to be plumbed in parallel rather than series. Can I



turn off the cold water inlet valve on one heater and unplug it to save some



electric power? Do I need to drain the heater that I won't be using? Should



I take the extra step of connecting the inlet pipe to the outlet pipe, (on



the plumbing side, not the heater side), in order to completely bypass that



heater? What else might I be missing?





Unplug it? Maybe it's on a plug, but all the electric WH's I've

seen were wired in. Nat gas ones that have a blower, those are on cords.

If there is no plug, maybe you can open the breaker, but not sure if

they would have separate breakers or be on one larger breaker



But if you want to disable one, I would just do what you suggested,

turn off the water supply and electric. I've done that with nat gas

ones that were in parallel where the house didn't really need two.

One problem though is that you only have 5500W? That's small for a

50 gallon, the recovery time is going to be slow, and with only one,

you might run out at times, but you can try it and see.



From a longevity standpoint, you might be better off fully draining

it, leaving connections open so it could dry out. Not sure what effect

that would have in terms of keeping it good for future use versus

leaving it full of water.



It will save some money, but I doubt it's the source of much of your

bill. Whether you have one or two, it's going to take the same amount

of electricity to heat the water you use. The only thing you'll save

is the standby losses on the second tank. Electric ones are fully

insulated, have no flue up the middle, so I doubt it's going to make

much difference, but it will help.

You'd be surprised. We had a vacation house and I put a 30amp double pole switch in the hall to turn off the water heater when we were not there. Knocked 30-40 bucks off the bill.