How To Work Out How Much Your Annual water heating costs
The cost of your water heating bill depends upon many things including ...
- How many people in family
- Average cold water temperature coming into the home
- Heat losses from the hot water storage system (this is main reason why tankless water heaters save energy ... they reduce these losses dramatically)
- Temperature to which the hot water is heated before use
For an average family of 4 in the US heating of water would consume about 5,000
kWhr of electricity or equivalent in gas or oil. If you take a look at the
bottom of this page you will see the overall average cost of a unit of
electricity in the US is about $0.09 per kWhr.
However this can vary tremendously ... as you can see from the table below it's a lot more expensive to take a bath in New England than it is in East South Central states like Alabama and Kentucky. Whilst in Hawaii it is about 3 times as expensive as in Nebraska.
The annual cost of heating water on average would amount to around $450 per year. In California where most users of solar energy reside the cost would be about $600 per year.
In assessing what you might save from installing solar heating for water heating it's quite important to establish this base cost. Here's how you do it ..
Annual cost of heating water on average = 5,000 x cost of electricity from table below (or from your utilities bill) x number of people in family/4