Building America Case Study: Simple Retrofit High-Efficiency Natural Gas Water Heater Field Test, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Stacey Rothgeb, T. Schirber, B. Schoenbauer

Research output: NRELFact Sheet

Abstract

High performance water heaters are typically more time consuming and costly to install in retrofit applications, making high performance water heaters difficult to justify economically. However, recent advancements in high performance water heaters have targeted the retrofit market, simplifying installations and reducing costs. Four high efficiency natural gas water heaters designed specifically for retrofit applications were installed in single-family homes along with detailed monitoring systems to characterize their savings potential, their installed efficiencies, and their ability to meet household demands. The water heaters tested for this project were designed to improve the cost-effectiveness and increase market penetration of high efficiency water heaters in the residential retrofit market. The retrofit high efficiency water heaters achieved their goal of reducing costs, maintaining savings potential and installed efficiency of other high efficiency water heaters, and meeting the necessary capacity in order to improve cost-effectiveness. However, the improvements were not sufficient to achieve simple paybacks of less than ten years for the incremental cost compared to a minimum efficiency heater. Significant changes would be necessary to reduce the simple payback to six years or less. Annual energy savings in the range of $200 would also reduce paybacks to less than six years. These energy savings would require either significantly higher fuel costs (greater than $1.50 per therm) or very high usage (around 120 gallons per day). For current incremental costs, the water heater efficiency would need to be similar to that of a heat pump water heater to deliver a six year payback.
Original languageAmerican English
Number of pages2
StatePublished - 2017

Bibliographical note

Work performed by NorthernSTAR Building America Partnership, St. Paul, Minnesota

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/FS-5500-65445

Other Report Number

  • DOE/GO-102017-4834

Keywords

  • Building America
  • high efficiency water heating
  • natural gas water heating
  • NorthernSTAR
  • residential
  • residential buildings
  • retrofit water heaters
  • water heating

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