In sharing this great news of further huge savings on the electricity bill she very diplomatically pointed out (she knows how excited I get about savings) that we had not used the geyser the previous night… which explains the miraculous reduced heating time.
Ai tog. Anyway, you guys probably suspected something like this but continued to let me have my moment, lol.
Still hopeful though in terms of the further insulation being able to reduce heating time another 5-10 minutes.
If this is wishful thinking, please sjooosh and let me have my moment.
I believe too that insulating geysers is a good move. My parents had log cabin house and this had a little attic high up where the geyser was installed.There was zero ventilation but it was always warm what with the heat rising from the house.
No qualified audit but I recall that it could get up to (Goldilocks’) temp real quick…
I really like the Rinnai (Japanese) brand since I have a Rinnai fan-assisged gas space heater still working perfectly after 15+ years. Rinai closed their factories due to covid and the waiting period is about 6 months. Bosch - my installer says the importer went bankrupt. There is stock, selling at about 20% discount but you will not get any support if something breaks. Paloma - my installer mentioned them but I don’t know the brand.
Then there is Housetech and Totai, which I also do not know, and I really want a fan-assisted geyser.
Was this the geyser temperature as indicated by the Geyserwise unit? You need to measure the temp of the hot water at the shower and get a feel for the difference. But agreed you need to get all water up to temperature after a shutdown.
I don’t have one really. My house has two Bosch gas-geysers. One is now only a backup, after installing the heat pump. They do the job, but they use too much gas. It costs more to run them than an electrical geyser (unless you use very very little hot water). They have a temperature sensor in the chimney that switches them off if it runs too hot. The installers tend to pull this sensor off because it causes too many call-outs. We put ours back… and removed it again.
Of course the very fact that the chimney gets that hot means it is not very efficient at all. Not that I think there is much that can be done with such a simple device.
In terms of water flow, also had some issues. Geyser would switch off and refuse to switch back on until you stop the flow, count to ten, then open again… wait for cold water to clear the pipe.
We stayed at my Brother-in-law’s place in Cape Town over December for a wedding, the garden cottage we stayed in had a gas geyser that we where told from the get-go was a bit iffy.
I was not able to eek out a single good shower on that bloody thing, it just reaffirmed my already strong bias against gas geysers.
I can confirm that Paloma geysers work very well. They look to me to be the same design as the Rinnai. You set a temperature and it manages water and gas flow (it’s got a water pump and is fan-forced so it’s more efficient). It doesn’t do that thing you get with simple gas geysers where if you add too much cold water it cuts out.
Stay away from Atlas. If you want something low tech get an old Junkers.
Just a reminder that with these high tech gas geysers they require mains voltage to operate. I did a job to provide a UPS for a Rinnai gas geyser. No lights or TV power needed, just to have hot water when there was no power.
Yoh! glad I bought a decent gas geyser. my Dewhot 16l constant temp gas geyser just does it’s job. I can feed it cold mains direct and it heats up water to 65 degrees or feed in warm water from solar geyser and still get 65 degrees.
the only issue I had so far, going on 3yrs now, was just after installation, had to re seat an o ring after a small gas leak because the installer did not seat the o ring properly.
the unit requires a fresh battery once a year for the igniter - so screw eskom.
Works brilliantly and is only used when there is extended power outages. The advantage of this size, is that I may install it inside without requiring a COC.
I treat it as camping unit. If power is out, we in any event glamp ie, there is some discomfort involved.
So it can never compare with your unit or even a normal shower, but it does it job very well and doesn’t switch off for reasons mentioned above. Also have the battery self ignitor.
@Swartkat
very happy with mine and the way it’s setup. no matter the weather conditions I have either piping hot water direct from solar geyser in summer or piping hot water from gas booster geyser in winter. the gas geyser only gets used for about 3 months in winter. once the solar geyser gets above 50 degrees then no more gas geyser required.
So I don’t worry about:
running out of hot water
load shedding
battery capacity.
geyser timers
forgot to switch geyser on
how many people can shower at night or morning
hot water 24/7/365 without a single eskom electron been used. I bought 2 x 19kg tanks last month @ R1020.00 so that covers my gas for hot water (winter only) / my gas heater (winter only) / gas stove for the year.
as you can see from my current eskom bill my power consumption is minimal. My biggest user is my pool pump
