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Upgrade Your Water Heater
comments (0) April 29th, 2009 in Blogs
Robyn Doyon-Aitken, producer
The AirTap is a retrofit heat pump that installs on top of a 30-gal. to 80-gal. water heater; it does the same work as a water heater, but more efficiently.
Photo: Manufacturer
by Jefferson Kolle
AirTap
| ■ Manufactured by AirGenerate ■ 713-574-6729; www.airgenerate.com ■ Cost: about $700 |
When Sunil Sunha owned a commercial Laundromat, he spent a lot of money on hot water. So it’s easy to see why he came up with the idea for the AirTap, a retrofit heat pump that installs on top of a 30-gal. to 80-gal. water heater.
The premise is simple: A compressor extracts heat from the air and sends it into the water heater’s tank through a closed loop of copper tubing. The AirTap is not a preheater; it actually does the same work as a water heater, just more efficiently. As a bonus, the cold air that gets vented by the AirTap can be tied into an air-conditioning line or vented elsewhere in your house (vent kit: $79). The AirTap unit requires access to a drain to get rid of the quart of daily condensate the unit produces in a humid environment.
The average American household with a gas or electric water heater spends about 14% to 25% of its total energy costs on heating water. An AirTap cuts this in half. In the future, AirTap’s parent company plans to introduce an all-in-one heat-pump water heater (as opposed to the current retrofit model) and also a larger unit for commercial use—in Laundromats, no doubt.
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Watch the video While at a trade show, Fine Homebuiding editor Chris Ermides got up close and personal with an AirTap heat pump. Watch a video of Chris explaining exactly how the AirTap works. |
—Jefferson Kolle is a freelance writer in Bethel, Conn.
posted in: Blogs, energy efficiency, plumbing
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