I'm In Hot Water

For a while now, one of my major peeves with this house has been the hot water. The tank itself works fine; it heats up quickly and has plenty of capacity for my hot, steamy showers. The problem is the pipes. It just takes centuries for the hot water to make its way from the tank over to any of the faucets.

For example, I can turn on the tap, wet my hands, soap up, take my time and scrub a while, and then when I go to rinse off the water coming out of the tap will still be ice cold. Not ideal.

Thankfully, there's a solution to that problem, and it comes in the form of a circulation pump. All I need to do is install the pump on the hot water outlet of my tank.

And install a thermostatic bypass valve on the most distant sink, to allow a trickle of cold hot water to leak back into the cold water pipes, in order to make way for the hot water being pushed by the pump.

Installing the pump was a breeze. Really the only difficult part was carefully bending the corrugated copper line up to make room for the added height of the pump, without kinking and breaking it.

Then you just plug the cord into a nearby outlet, set up the timer for when you want it to not bother running (like late at night, or during the middle of the day if you're usually away from home), and let it do its thing.

Installing the bypass valve under the sink was similarly easy.

You're technically supposed to fasten it to the wall with the included screw anchors, but I couldn't find a good position where the lines wouldn't end up kinked and where the fittings would still all be accessible, so I just left it like this.

And the result? Perfectly warm water at every faucet, within seconds of turning on the tap. The shower temperature is a little bit unstable when you first turn it on though, as the hot hot water pushes out the warm hot water, and then the cold cold water pushes the warm cold water out of the pipes, but it's nothing I can't deal with.

I just love that I can actually use warm water to wash my hands now.