Plumbing

Toughguy

I have recently renovated my basement and notices that the hot water takes a lot longer to warm up. I have 4 faucets in the basement, the kitchen being the furthest takes the longest time to warm up. The closest is the shower and that gets warm water instantly. What should I be looking for?

ddawg16

It's actually pretty simple math.....you have x amount of flow through your hot water pipes....however long it takes for the water to get there....that is your warm up time.

Did you by any chance increase the diameter of the water pipe?

Case in point....I recently moved my hot water heater from the front of the house to the rear....I'm doing a 2-story addition and a majority of the plumbing action is back there. So now, the only items in the front of the house using hot water is the kitchen sink and dish washer. I 'did' have a 3/4" line from the back to the front....I have now replaced it with a 1/2" line....it had no impact on water flow, but it cut in half the time it takes the water at the sink to get hot.

With the 3/4" pipe, I had about 0.8 gal of water that had to flow through the sink faucet before I could start getting hot water. (about a 33' run). With a 1/2" copper pipe, it's now about 0.35 gal.....less than half....

What this means is that I only have to run half as much water out of my faucet before the hot gets there.....not only does it save me water, but I get it in half the time.

So....if you upsized any of those lines, it means you have to displace that water before the hot gets there.

Solution? Depends on your layout.....one option is to maybe look into a hot water recirc system.

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DrHicks

What ddawg said. ^

Also, if you installed new faucets, they probably have flow restricters. As a result, they're running less water than the old faucets, and it simply takes longer to run the cold water out of the pipe.


Anecdotally, my wife & I live in a big 2-1/2 story brick house. The main bathroom is on the 2nd level, and the water heater is in the basement. It takes quite awhile to get hot water up to the bathroom. The only real solution is to install a tankless water heater in the upstairs bathroom. I may eventually do this, but right now the cost makes it very unappealing to do so.

danpik

with this renovation, what changes did you make. Did you just paint walls or rip everything out including the plumbing and redo it?

I recently had a customer with a similar issue. turns out that their nephue conned them into pulling all of their old copper pies out and replace it with PEX. The old system was 3/4" trunk lines with 1/2" branch feeds to each fixture. The new "improved" system is all 1/2" PEX with about 50-60 elbows and other fittings. Each one of these fittings has an Iof 3/8". It takes a lot longer for the water to move thru the mess he put down there. I am sure he made out good at the local scrap yard though.

ddawg16

That ^^ too....

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fixrite

ok.......Let me get this straight. Putting in smaller lines decreases the wait time as less water has to be moved. But if you change from 1/2" copper to 1/2" pex it takes longer. This does not make sense to me as 1/2" pex has a smaller inside diameter than 1/2" copper. Plus the fact that pex is flexible and if you think out your plans you can avoid a lot of elbows, but I won't get into that part. Please explain to my simple brain.........