Sounds like a good idea but is it? I have a hot water circulation pump in our new home. While it is great to have almost instant hot water, our utility (electric) bill was over double than that of our old home. We were useing 3600 kwh per month! After some investigation I found that if I turned off the pump AND closed the valves my electric bill dropped immeadiatly to 1600-1800 kwh per month. I found that 24 hours per day the water went out hot and returned a little cooler causing my hot water heater to come back to heat the water back up again! Sounds like a good idea, but is it?
I have to agree with jeffta. I don't have a pump but my parents, who live in a fairly large house did, and their bill for heating the water (oil HWH) was cut substantially when they turned off the pump. I guess it's a choice of which resource to waste, water or electric/oil/gas. Water in our area is cheap so if cost is the driving factor then I would probalby turn the pump off.
I have an electric instant hot water heater in my house. I love it. Mine is mounted in the basement near my old 40 gallon natural gas heater so I still have to wait for hot water, however when the hot water's not on, neigther is the power. If you can pre-plan for a tankless unit near most of your fixtures you'd have the best of all worlds and save the most of water and energy this way. In my case this is not practical as my home is already built and retrofitting costs would be substantial. However, in new construction a propertly sized electric unit, installed will cost slightly more than $1,000 in most cases which isn't a whole lot more than the cost quoted in the video.
From the video I didn't see any way of adjusting the temperature or controlling the time of operation. Which is likely the reason for the high utility bills they had experienced. My neighbor had one of those kind that have the black plastic valve under the sink but when I felt the water it felt the same as the cold faucet, not cold but not hot either. We did quite a bit of searching for our recirculation system and went with a redytemp. Mainly so we could control the temperature and make it hotter if we wanted and to make the neighbors jealous. Some day I'll have to install an outlet under the sink but for now we just plugged it into the outlet above the sink. I let the wife decide how hot she wanted it since she is the one in charge, or so she thinks. We got a short cord a plugged the clapper into the timer. We then put the clapper in burglar mode where it listens for any sounds. In the morning when our alarms goes off it hears it and turns on and we have hot water in the mronings instead of running all day. It also has a hook up for push button override so when we want water in the middle of the day, we just push a doorbell button and it runs one time and stops. We love it.
