Bathroom clutter or undersink electrical outlets
This post comes after a brief scuffle with the wife over cluttered counter space around our bathroom sink. All the pictures you see of remodeled bathrooms show no signs of hair dryers, hair curlers, toothbrush charger stations, electric razors charging, etc all over the counters. Instead, it’s quite the opposite. Which made me wonder; do other families also live with cluttered bathroom counter tops? I can only imagine that other families like ourselves quickly get tired of plugging and unplugging these daily use items time and again and like us eventually choose to live with the clutter.
We installed an outlet under our sink after purchasing a Redytemp hot water circulator for our upstairs master bath years ago ending our waiting forever for hot water each morning and again before showering. If you find yourself waiting long for hot water we recommend getting one, if not for the water savings then for the efficiency it brings to your daily routine. We were skeptics especially after reading problems others were having with these devices, but wound up getting a Redytemp for a number of reasons, long story short we’ve experience none of the problems others mentioned from using systems costing half what we paid. If homes were built with electrical outlets under the sink area people could easily keep clutter to a minimum by leaving hair dryers, toothbrush chargers, etc stored within drawers or hanging on cabinet doors under the sinks without having to plug and unplug these devices day after day.
My question is this, does anyone see any negative affects of running a high watt hair dryer connected to the same outlet as our Redytemp atc3000 hot water circulator? Could we cause any damage to the pump if we used the hair dryer while it was pumping? It’s currently connected to a GFI and I want to hang a surge supressor power strip on the inside wall under the sink. Allowing us to keep the items mentioned above within drawers and not take up space on the counters. We currently have the hot water circulate 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening. If need be we could run the Redytemp in it’s on-demand mode.
Replies
If it's just a circulator pump (and not a heater) it's drawing maybe 100-200 watts when running. The hair dryer draws anywhere from 600 to 1800. Both running together COULD be just barely enough to trip the breaker.
But otherwise, there'd be no problem running the two together. No need for a surge suppressor -- hair driers are immune to surges and don't cause them.
Probably not a problem
Question: Is your ready temp one of the automatic ones, or do you manually call it?
Advice: It probably won't overload the circuit to have bot the ready-temp and hair dryer on at the same time. If youa re really worried about it, put in one of the aire switches they make for garbage disposals. They switch back and fort between tow recptacles. Typically one is used for the disposal, and the other for the dish washer. So, when the disposal is running the dishwasher isn't.
Another option would be to find one of the wall mount blow dryers that they mount in hotels and motels. On the better ones there is an integral cord reel to keep the cord neatly out of the way.