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Two-flat owner journal 3: Choosing the right water heater

Read all of the “Two-flat owner journal” entries

This journal entry is all about the several hours of time I spent researching which water heaters to buy for my two-flat. While my architect works on drawing the plans, I am doing a lot of research to answer questions for him, so he knows what appliances are going to be hooked up to the house’s mechanical systems.

I started researching water heaters on a cold Saturday in January so I could fill out the “appliance schedule” for the project. My first journal entry was about my new distaste for Peoples Gas. Since then, my view has evolved and we (my architect and I) are designing an all-electric house.

SCROLL DOWN FOR THE RESEARCH – Read on while I discuss my thoughts about electricity and natural gas as a power source for homes.

Discussion

Let me step back a moment. I also have a “distaste” (a weird word to use when talking about something that would literally kill you if you drank it) for fossil fuels, too. When I approached this research task I thought that an electric tankless water heater had some kind of inherent efficiency over an electric or natural gas-powered tank type.

But it doesn’t, and that’s partly dependent on how much water a household uses. Tankless water heaters are sometimes marketed as providing “unlimited” hot water, which scared me. Since I don’t go to an office anymore (because of COVID-19 and because I quit my office-attached job), I take a shower every other day. And they’re long. Just imagine that your shower never ran out of hot water. I might not get out. So that’s a personal critique of the type of water heater.

(Another con of tankless water heaters: When the electric is off, water cannot be heated; with a tank water heater, there is always residual hot water in the tank, which can still flow. Additionally, electric tankless water heaters have special electrical box requirements because they draw so much electricity.)

Let’s talk about the fuel. Natural gas is cheap right now – to purchase. But it has awful costs elsewhere, namely its contribution to pollution and carbon dioxide emissions when burnt. Burning it in the home also releases additional gases, which is why I think you should run your range hood vent/exhaust when you cook food on the stovetop.

Gas stoves emit a host of dangerous pollutants, including particulate matter, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide. 

Mother Jones, “How the Fossil Fuel Industry Convinced Americans to Love Gas Stoves”, by Rebecca Leber, FEBRUARY 11, 2021

Going electric in the kitchen is pretty easy, I think. I didn’t do much research and I picked out all Energy Star-certified appliances. For cooking I chose a range with an induction cooktop and an electric convection oven (which means there’s a fan inside to blow the heat around for even cooking). Induction cooktops, while being a really efficient user of energy, have cooking benefits: Water reaches a boil faster, the surface is easy to clean, and there are fewer burns because the surface doesn’t get hot.

Creating an all-electric house is pretty easy, actually, until you get to the heating and cooling part, and knowing how to heat a house with electricity in the very cold climate of northern Illinois requires even more research.

Water heaters are actually easy to figure out (after 5 hours of research) because, in the end, all you do is plug them in to a 240 volt receptacle and connect to the already-existing water pipes.

I am still in the middle of researching electric heating and cooling and I’ve opened a conversation with two HVAC contractors (one that sells Carrier and one that sells Mitsubishi).

Water heater research

I originally tweeted all of this on January 16, 2021, because I like using Twitter as a sounding board.

I have researched five types of water heaters because I want to fully understand the purchase price and energy price of each.

  1. Natural gas, tank
  2. Natural gas, tankless
  3. Electric, tank
  4. Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump)
  5. Electric, tankless 

Based on my research of manufacturers’ reported “Energy Guide” stickers (the yellow stickers required by federal law) for these five types, the Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump) (option 4) is far and away the most efficient water heater. 

The Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump) has an annual operating cost of $104. What is this thing? It takes the standard tank, uses electric heating elements (think of the wires inside your bread toaster), and extracts heat from the air in your house with the heat pump. That’s pretty amazing: There is free heat to be extracted from the air.

The Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump) has less than half the operating cost of the next lowest type: Natural gas, tankless.

Rheem (a water heater manufacturer, which also owns the Richmond brand) says that an electric tank water heater with hybrid heat pump uses less electricity than an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb.

Note that the electrical prices in the yellow “Energy Guide” sticker is 12 cents per kWh, and ComEd just charged me ~7 cents per kWh, so the annual operating costs of electric are less than the stickers say. 

Next, as part of the “total cost of ownership” (well, minus maintenance) I added in the purchase price. The Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump) costs $1,400. That’s 1.5-4x more expensive than the other types of water heaters!

However, I’ve since found that Rheem/Richmond makes a couple cheaper models that don’t have high-tech features, so the purchase price is anywhere from $1,000 (if you can find that model) to $1,175.

I calculated the “5 year cost of ownership” price for water heaters of each type because it makes sense to distribute the purchase price over a period of its lifetime. I could have easily made this a 10-year amortization since water heaters come with 6 to 12-year warranties. I interpret the length of the warranty as the manufacturer’s assessment as to how durable they’ve created the machine.

How they compare

Of the five types, I compared 11 machines (view the comparison chart).

The cheapest water heaters over five years are: 

  1. Electric tankless
    $1,479 (caveats in that annual energy cost was extrapolated because a direct Energy Guide sticker wasn’t found)
  2. Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump)
    $1,695 (does not include federal tax credit)
  3. Natural gas, tank
    $1,999

Remember, though, that the Energy Guide stickers for the electric water heaters use a 41.7 percent higher energy cost than ComEd currently charges, and ComEd offers hourly pricing so the price can be much, much lower per kWh and the prices for the electric water heaters are EVEN LOWER. (Thank you for pointing this out, Troy.)

Guess what…the price of the Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump) can come down even more because of (1) a ComEd rebate, and (2) federal tax credit worth 10 percent of the purchase price + installation, up to $300.

Bonus: By getting electric you are part of the carbon-free future. 

Further discussion

Now that I’ve convinced you that an Electric, tank (hybrid w/heat pump) water heater is the cheapest option, here are a couple of other things that came up in the Twitter conversations.

  • Including utilities (i.e. electricity cost) in the rent for the rental apartment in my two-flat benefits both me and the tenant. The tenant has a fixed and predictable energy cost and fewer bills to pay, while I am able to charge a bit more than I predict the cost will be in order to pay back the higher upfront costs of the water heater and the Energy Star-certified appliances (as well as the heating and cooling system).
  • The calculations might be different if I looked into having individual tankless water heaters at the point of demand, or using them as “boosters”. Tankless water heaters come in a variety of capacities and energy outputs (measured by how much energy it takes to increase the temperature from how cold the water is when it enters the house or heater to the desired temperature). One could be added to the kitchen, the bathroom, and next to the laundry, and sized for the differing demands of each location.
  • A complex system could be built that is programmed to buy energy from ComEd when the hourly cost is the lowest and use the power from the battery when the hourly cost is highest.
  • A couple people asked about geothermal. I looked into it and I wrote it off quickly: A drilling rig needs to access the yard to drill multiple horizontal wells. The garage blocks that from happening. However, an apartment building renovation in Rogers Park designed by PMP Architects is converting its heating system to use geothermal energy.

2020 year in review

Rear view of the two prefab single-unit detached houses and their backyard ADUs
I was biking around in Denver and I came across these identical modular houses with backyard houses under construction. The City of Denver posts building permit plans online, which is fantastic because it makes design more transparent. Architects from around the world can be inspired by this project.
  • Due to the (ongoing) COVID-19 pandemic, I started working from home on March 12, 2020. I visited the office once in the fall for an hour to perform a minor task.
  • My small business, Chicago Cityscape, hired Casey Smagala to run business development for the real estate information website.
  • I bought a two-flat in East Garfield Park in the summer after touring dozens of houses. I had first toured this house, and met the owner, Carl, who lived there, in February. I toured it a second time that month, with my friend, Kevin. After several more months of touring houses and realizing that I couldn’t afford an already-renovated house, I made an offer to Carl in May. The house closed in July.
  • Friends in Denver asked me and my friend, R, to come visit and camp, hike, and bike in and around Aspen in August. Denver also has allowed accessory dwelling units (ADUs) for years, so I talked to a local housing organizer and biked around the city looking at backyard houses.
  • I didn’t move into my two-flat because it turned out to need more renovation than I had believed. I also started a journal, which has one post so far.
  • I left my job as of December 31, 2020, so that I could focus on developing and growing Chicago Cityscape.
  • By the end of the year, I published eight blog posts. I didn’t have a goal; two of them were based on books I was reading: (1) Before the Lake Street elevated (now the Green Line) was built, a monorail was proposed (via a book about the history of the CTA’s predecessors)! (2) I read Beryl Satter’s book about her father, a landlord in Chicago, “Family Properties”, and I biked by one of the extant buildings.
  • My “hot air balloon” was used for some cool projects that needed aerial photography (both co-produced by Paola Aguirre and her consulting firm, Borderless Studio). I filmed some the massive mapmaking happening at the former Overton school in Bronzeville – which can only be seen from the sky – for an AIA film challenge; I also snagged some clips of the Pink Line ‘L’ going in and out of the California Ave station to visualize an area being studied for a corridor revitalization.

The high rises of the Bronzeville lakefront

3600 S King Dr

I shot this aerial photo yesterday from the 3600 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

The “towers in the park” are three groups of apartment buildings (none are public housing).

From north (background) to south (foreground):

  • Prairie Shores (5 identical buildings that are very hard to see)
  • Lake Meadows (4 identical buildings behind the associated one-story shopping center plus multiple buildings to the east, closer to the lakefront)
  • T.K. Lawless Gardens (3 identical buildings, that appear the tallest because they’re the closest, 746 units, and 54 townhouses not seen)

John Warren Moutoussamy (an architecture graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology who studied under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) designed Lawless Gardens, according to this IIT Magazine article.

Two-flat owner journal 1: Peoples Gas charges a lot of money for no gas

One of the first things I did after I bought a two-flat in July was contact Peoples Gas and Comed to ensure utilities were in my name, and that the utility connections would not be interrupted.

A few days later I decided that I wasn’t going to move in, because I wanted to make a good amount of changes and the best time to do that would be when nobody is living there. “Good amount of changes” turned into “gut rehab”. One of my friends is an architect and we (mostly him) are drawing permit plans right now.

It wasn’t until a week ago (8 weeks since I bought the house) that I realized there’s no reason to be paying for Peoples Gas to maintain a connection when I’m not using natural gas.

I’m writing this journal entry to exclaim how expensive it is to just “leave the gas line connected”.

It costs $50 per month per unit to have the privilege of possibly purchasing the delivery of natural gas through a pipe. Both units used 0 therms in the longest-period bill I received. (I received three bills, only one of which was for 30 days.)

The bill for the only 30-day period Peoples Gas served one of the units in my two-flat. Both units are unoccupied until after the gut rehab is completed. See the “customer charge”, which is the charge just to have an account open and for the potential to use gas.

I’ve got to pay $50 per unit for no gas.

I visited a three-flat under construction in Pilsen on Friday, and talked to the developer, Brent. He described how he’s following high-efficiency building wall standards to create a “tight envelope” (one in which very little air can leak) so that the tenants can “receive the comfort they’re paying for”. When it comes to setting the thermostat, the air delivered by HVAC machines should match that exactly, no more, no less. No oversized furnaces pushing too much heated air because so much of the air leaks through the walls and windows.

And, as a way to control costs, Brent will not connect a natural gas pipe to the building, mostly because of the expensive and default customer charge that persists even when no gas is used. A VRF (variable refrigerant flow) and heat pump machines will be entirely powered by electricity to serve the tenant’s heating and cooling needs.

Brent said that the tight building envelope coupled with the high-efficiency HVAC means that it’s more cost effective to use electricity to heat a house than natural gas.

After our meeting, I looked again at my final bill from Peoples Gas (I closed the account two days prior) and understood what Brent was saying about controlling costs. With an electric water heater and an electric range, there’s no need to have any gas connection.

I will probably have to keep the gas at my two-flat, to power the furnaces, because I don’t have the expertise or financial resources to renovate an existing building to have a tight enough envelope to make electrically-generated heat more cost effective than gas-generated heat.

Update January 13, 2021: I turned off the gas and closed the accounts so I don’t have to waste any money while I’m not living there (a gut rehab still needs to happen).

To keep water pipes from freezing and bursting I cleared the vast majority of water lines and added an electric pipe heating cable to keep the remaining sections warm.

The two water service pipes (I don’t know why there are two) have an electric pipe heating cable and are wrapped in foam insulation. The cable has a thermostat that touches the pipe and starts heating when the pipe drops to 38°F. The pipe is heated until the thermostat detects ~46°F.

What is this place? Des Plaines “park” edition

Screenshot shows the “park” in Des Plaines, Illinois.

I was methodically reviewing features on OpenStreetMap that could benefit from additional attributes, namely missing names and cities. The information on OpenStreetMap feeds into Chicago Cityscape so that the real estate information service I created can show people looking up addresses the locations of nearby amenities, including parks.

This particularly large park in Des Plaines had no name and no city, so I started investigating. From the overhead imagery view, it looked to me like a landfill.

Since there was a forest preserve to the east, I looked in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County’s nice interactive map for any properties near Beck Lake. Nothing found.

Overhead imagery of the so-called “park”. Source: Mapbox

I looked on Google Maps Street View for some insight and there was no name. (Note that data from Google Maps cannot be used to amend OpenStreetMap because of Google Maps having a data license that isn’t compatible with OSM’s openness requirements).

Next I looked at the Cook County parcel map that Chicago Cityscape has to identify its “Property Index Number” (PIN). All of it fits within 04-31-300-003-0000 – the database pointed to “Catholic Cemeteries” as the property owner.

I looked up that PIN on the Cook County Recorder of Deeds to try and find more information. Lo and behold, the most recent document that was recorded against the PIN was for a “Memorandum of Option Agreement” that identified the Catholic Bishop of Chicago as the landlord and Patriot Acres, LLC, as the tenant.

Patriot Acres has a website that describes a new commercial composting facility being built at this location.

I re-tagged the feature on OSM with “amenity=waste_disposal” and “waste=organic” to properly describe it as a composting facility, and not a park. Case closed.