I just bought an EcoDrain A1000
Last Post 10 Jul 2017 05:37 PM by berryvt. 31 Replies.
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Dana1User is Offline
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04 Dec 2015 02:19 PM
I'm not suggesting that Retherm is correct, but found the flat-out denial a bit amusing.

I totally get that the couple of liters of chemically-charged dishwasher output is both toxic and insufficient BTUs to provide any benefit. All of which added up to why I could see how those cold-water hand & clothes washing households with an 8-foot heat recovery unit could have a problem with their septic systems. I wasn't suggesting that a toilet flush was going to be enough of a heat spike to be very useful for keeping the septic going, only that it's the same order of magnitude of heat that you would be delivering with a much-bigger-than-realistic heat exchanger.

But again, that is NOT how most people live, and I've never seen anything bigger than a 3" x 60" in anybody's house.

"If so little energy is extracted, why bother putting them in at all?"

At 10 cents/kwh and an electric hot water heater a ~50% efficiency drainwater heat exchanger has a reasonable financial payoff for 3-4 person households who are primarily shower-bathers showering daily. For a retired couple who only shower together once a week would never recoup the investment. The A1000 would take about 1.2-1.5x as long to pay off, but it still pays in that scenario. (In my case the decision to install it was performance based, not financial, so that I could keep my reverse-indirect storage temperature lower and still have sufficient showering capacity in the dead of winter simultaneously with all zones calling for heat, since there's no such thing as a "priority zone" with an system centered around a reverse indirect hot water heater. It may or may not have paid off in natural gas savings by now, but it paid for itself in family harmony the first winter! :-) )

According to Renewabilty, as of 2011 about 20% of housing starts were getting DWHX, and there were already over 15,000 of DWHX installed in Ontario alone (See page 6):

https://www.resnet.us/uploads/documents/conference/2012/pdfs/Buchalter-Drain_Water_Heat_Recovery_Systems.pdf

Of course most people in Ontario live in a warmer climate than Kenora, so maybe only ~1500 of those would be relevant data points, but there are clearly thousands of installations more than 5 years old in Canada.

I don't get the relevance of "They did nothing about stand by losses or theft of heat from the house it self. " in this context!? Yes, they only measured the heat transfer efficiency of the heat exchangers, so...

...? They didn't measure the distance to the moon, nor the atomic weight of plutonium- is that somehow a problem? :-)

BadgerBoilerMNUser is Offline
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04 Dec 2015 03:58 PM
I love those performance arguments. Makes me want to cut 5 feet of my stack out yet today!

What is the atomic weight of plutonium...?
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FBBPUser is Offline
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05 Dec 2015 11:09 AM
"If so little energy is extracted, why bother putting them in at all?"

Guess I should have finished that thought, "and risk the long life of the septic system." I don't have a problem with using them in the city. But you might be selling Grandpa short!

Wish I could find some of the data coming from other then ReTherm. Who knows but they might be correct. Still I find myself looking for the salt shaker when someone tells me that 20% of all new homes have adopted a relatively new technology. If thats true, I think it would be a first. Anyway base on comments on this thread and forum, there could be 1500 rural installations causing failure but few if any would recognize the root cause.

Would have been nice if the boys and girls had of considered thing like cold air blowing through the drain stack 24 hours a day and how that might effect the overall efficiency of the setup. Like on a cold January day, Calgary's sani sewers are running air below freezing and the outside air is minus 30. Must have some effect on the daily water temps circulating around this cold air. Does it mean that we would be spending more gas to heat water for purposes other then showers? I think others assume that this might be as I have seen installs with a main line trap right under the HX. And there is a pretty good chance there might be a convectional current set up in a 4" stack on a cold day which might cool off the HX. If they had taken the insulation off the pipe, would the HX been less effective because the water is grabbing some of the heat from the house and therefore can't take as much from the waste stream?

Just saying it would have been nice if they had addressed some of these issues. I suspect these issues would effect straight pipe HX more then the A1000.

This is another study some may find interesting. http://www.cmhc.ca/odpub/pdf/65680.pdf Different setup then NRC but looks like somewhat similair results but I have not really looked at it. If the numbers on page six are correct, it would not convince me to "cut out 5 feet of my stack" but I suspect that second and third generation of HX available today may be more efficient.
Dana1User is Offline
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06 Dec 2015 10:58 AM
That was Renewability, not ReTherm with the data suggeting 20% of new homes were being fitted with DWHR.

I'm doubtful that the heat load on the house due to convection currents in the vent stacks are very different with a 4' section of copper stack near the bottom compared to PVC or cast iron. Even if the liter or two of water in the HX ends up averaging a degree or two colder than the other cold water distribution plumbing on the rare days than average -30C, it would be a "so what?" amount compared to th total energy used in hot water heating. It's certainly outside the scope of what they were trying to measure.
BadgerBoilerMNUser is Offline
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06 Dec 2015 12:48 PM
Sounds like they should all be fit with a whole-house air admittance devise e.g. Studor vent.
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BadgerBoilerMNUser is Offline
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06 Dec 2015 12:48 PM
Sounds like they should all be fit with a whole-house air admittance devise e.g. Studor vent.
MA<br>www.badgerboilerservice.com
FBBPUser is Offline
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07 Dec 2015 07:28 PM
"That was Renewability"
You are right. My mistake.
We can have many days of -25 to -30c, so it might add up.
What about the cold air flowing inside the water film as the water comes down? Badgers idea might make a difference.
Dana1User is Offline
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08 Dec 2015 12:57 PM
Air films are insulative, even cold air films. The heat transfer from the water to the air is tiny compared to the conducted heat between the copper drainpipe and the water film clinging to it. The thermal mass of air is also tiny, and the proximate air inside the heat exchanger is going to be much warmer than the air at the top of the stack above the roof line. It takes a LOT of air volume to move many BTU, even at the 60-70C delta-T on the coldest hours of the coldest days of the year (which is exactly when you're taking a shower, right? :-) ), not the kind of air volumes that would be flowing via convection in a 4" stack.

Maybe with a high pressure air handler blower driving -40C air down the stack you could create a measurable heat loss effect on the heat exchanger though! :-)
ronmarUser is Offline
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29 Dec 2015 09:48 AM
Posted By Dana1 on 08 Dec 2015 12:57 PM

Maybe with a high pressure air handler blower driving -40C air down the stack you could create a measurable heat loss effect on the heat exchanger though! :-)

Yea, but you would also probably hear the P traps bubbling and smell the drain system in the house under those conditions:)

This almost sounds like a buisness opportunity... Solar heating systems for septic tanks... "Put a little sunshine in your tank:)"
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29 Dec 2015 10:16 AM
I agree - a PV solar panel and a resistance heater could conceivably pay for themselves in reduced pump-out intervals. And we know that people will believe in things even without solid data.

Would be interesting to know if air admittance valves provide any measurable energy savings.
RobertsonUser is Offline
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13 Apr 2016 01:27 AM
Posted By jonr on 29 Nov 2015 11:22 AM
Sticking a temperature probe in the septic tank and logging before and after results would be quite interesting.


But please, not the one you're going to use on your rib roast.
berryvtUser is Offline
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10 Jul 2017 05:37 PM
@kenora How have you found the EcoDrain A1000 performance to be? Have you been able to measure your energy gains via heat recapture? What's your overall opinion of the product?
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