THE INSIDIOUS MIXER FAUCET
In these days of rampant, 40 year-high inflation in the USA, now at 8.3% year over year, we are all looking to save expensive energy wherever we can. The experts are all encouraging us to cut our use of now expensive fuel oil, natural gas or electricity. Even our US local news programs are eager to provide us with “tips to conserve energy” at the end of each morning show.
But circumstances are even worse in the UK where that nation imports most of its energy and with the US and EU shunning Russian oil and gas, prices for fuel oil (electricity and natural gas) are expected to jump 80% this winter. As a result, energy saving ideas are even more rampant on the World Wide Web in the UK. Some that appear there are untrue or old myths such as: washing dishes in the dishwasher is the most efficient way, or that oven-cooked foods use the least amount of energy—(no, microwave cooking does), while other ideas, like filling the kettle with only the amount of cups you plan to use, fix all leaky faucets, increase insulation, and turn off appliances like TVs that have a “stand by” mode, all do save energy.
But no one has mentioned the most universal, insidious, and energy-wasting device we all have in our kitchens and bathrooms—the modern and homemaker-desired “mixer faucet”. This ubiquitous and common faucet has a single control handle for both hot and cold water. Push the handle to the right, and up— and it delivers cold water, push it left and up, and the spigot pours out hot water. It is admittedly very convenient, but it was designed for a different age—when energy was cheap. Today, it is a fuel and energy waster and should be replaced. (But not this winter-it will not save you to make that investment) This very common plumbing device was invented in the days of cheap energy. Coming from a family of plumbers, I remember seeing one of my uncles installing a hot water supply line into the base of a toilet-water closet.
“Why hot water ?” I asked.
“Well hot water will prevent the water tank generating condensation (and the drip of that water to the floor) that occurs in the summer on those hot and humid days”, he explained.
Today we would not waste hot water to flush down the toilet…or do we? The mixer faucet is almost as bad an energy waster.
When I was a youngster all bathrooms and kitchens had two taps, one for hot water, on the left, and the one on the right provided cold water. There was no mixing of hot and cold. (Except for my grandpa’s country house where a cast iron hand, lift-pump at the sink drew up chilly water from the concrete rainwater cistern under the house. In grandma’s kitchen, if one wanted hot water, one had to get it from a kettle placed on the stove and then heated there.)
The problem with the mixer faucet is that it too often provides tepid water all the time. My personal observations suggest that no one keeps the handle all the way to the right—on cold. Mixer faucets are almost always mixing in hot water with the cold to provide the user with tepid water, even when that is not needed. Go to any sink now, and check on this. The handle is always in the center, or too far to the right, supplying the user tepid or hot water—not cold.
The result of all this is that the hot water heater, which is most often a water supply tank ( in the basement or utility closet) served by electricity, LP gas, natural gas, or heating oil runs incessantly. Each and every time someone draws water with a mixer faucet icy cold water enters the water tank, causing its temperature to drop. The tank is designed to keep the hot water supply at just above 140 F. Every time the temperature falls bellow that level, an internal thermostat turns the heater element on and costly electric current, oil, or gas are used to heat the chilled water back up to the “set” temperature. (More modern, “under sink heaters” with “on demand” hot water work very much the same way...although they waste less energy since they do not store hot water).
When mixer faucets are used regularly during the day or evening, there is a resulting constant flow of energy use (fuel oil, electricity, natural gas or LP) to the heater element as it continues to attempt to maintain its set temperature. Most of this energy is wasted energy...since often, the user does not bother to turn the faucet to cold. They draw tepid water when cold water would do very nicely. Too often the mixer lever remains at the half-way mark which causes hot water to mix with cold.
Using some “back of the envelope” calculations: a typical USA household faucet is claimed to draw between 18-27 gallons a day. In the USA there are an estimated 124 million US households. Assuming each one will have at the very least two mixer faucets (one in the kitchen and one in bathroom) that is, at a minimum, there may be at least about 248 million faucets in USA homes. Assume they are all mixer faucets set at the mix “half and half” mark. One can calculate the per day use of those faucets at: (18 gallons per day of which half of those gallons are hot water) = thus we would expect 9 gallons of wasted hot water per day from each faucet or 9 x @248 million faucets = @ 2,232,000,000) or perhaps at a minimum, about 2.2 billion ) or 2.2xe9 gallons of water are heated each day unnecessarily.
It takes about one (1) BTU (British Thermal Unit) to raise one pound of water one degree F. One gallon of water weighs about 8.33 pounds, thus to raise the temperature of one gallon of water one degree F requires about 8.33 BTU. Assuming that domestic hot water is raised from ambient ground water temperature of about 50F to 140F in the water heater. Thus (140F-50F = 90F) or the water must be raised by about 90 degrees F. Furthermore one gallon of water heated to 90 degrees would require 8.33 BTU X 90 F degrees = 747.7 BTU. (Or nearly 750 BTU is required per gallon heated to 140 F) Thus for each gallon heated to 140F in the heater one must expend about 750 BTUs. Thus 750 BTU/gal X 2.2 billion gal heated unnecessarily = 1,650,000,000,000 BTUs or 1.65 X e12 BTUs wasted every day. And this waste is only the result of the innocuous looking mixer faucet.
Not to bore you but, how many barrels of oil might that represent? Each 42 gallon bbl of crude can generate @ 6 million BTU. If USA mixer faucets waste 1.65Xe12 BTU /and each bbl represents 6Xe6 BTU = that is equal to about 2.7Xe8 bbls (about 270,000 barrels) of oil. That is a per day figure. So we are not talking chicken feed here. Today the going cost of each bbl is about $100 dollars.
Think of that poor UK householder who is warned by experts to heat water in her kettle only to the amount of cups of water she actually needs, while here in the USA, our mixer faucets are wasting billions of gallons of heated water.
Help the energy crisis by keeping that mixer faucet always on the right until hot water is actually needed
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