It's gotten to 120 OUTSIDE the garage, in the shade! (hotter inside).

Water pipes are also not deep, so on hot days, "cold water" can be warm
enough to bathe in!

During the winter, when it gets a "chilly" 65 in the garage at night, the
extra "kick" to the WH is nice.... (I don't need hot water at 2am on most
days!)

Let's say the timer saves me $.05/day for 6 months of the year.. That's
about $10/year. The timer cost about $25, 10 years back, so I've got $75
more than if I didn't!

Now, I also have a programmable thermostat, and that's save me another
$150...
Then there's the $20 I spent on weather stripping and saved me another
$90...
etc....
It all adds up......

"Phil Sherrod" wrote in message
...

On 29-Mar-2004, "AZ Woody" wrote:

I live in Phoenix, where there are times my WH is warmer than the temp
setting (it's in my non-AC garage).

Wow, your garage is 120+ degrees? Do you cook roasts out there too?

In that case, your heat loss from the idle water heater would be $0.00

I do however, have a timer.. Turn it
on about an hour before I wake, and off a few hours later (for
weekends).

There's nothing wrong with that, but your savings are probably miniscule.
When
you turn the heater on, it is going to run long enough to heat the water
to
whatever temperature the thermostat is set for; that might take 15 minutes
of
continuous running. The measurements for my water heater show that the
total
on-time for the heating element is 23 minutes per day (accomplished by
only a
few cycles per day).

Let's say the average temperature in your garage is 85 degrees (vs. 61 in
my
crawl space) and your water temperature is the same as mine -- 114
degrees.
You've got a temperature differential of 29 degrees, and I've got a
differential of 53 degrees. Then your cost of heat loss (assuming 8
cents/KWH)
is about $3.28 per month. I would be surprised if your timer dropped the
average water temperature enough to halve the heat loss, so you may be
saving
$1.50/month if you're lucky.

Do you turn off the lights if a room is empty? Same thing.

No it's not the same thing. When you turn on your water heater, it runs
until
it heats the water to the set temperature; the longer it was off, the
longer it
has to run to make up for the temperature drop. Unless it's off for a
long
time, the energy required to restore the temperature will come close to
matching the energy that would have been required to hold the temperature
constant. On the other hand, when you turn on a light, it doesn't have
to
make up for the darkness that existed while it was off.