Maintaining Your Hot Water Heater in the Kalamazoo Winter
If you’ve lived through a Kalamazoo winter before, then you’re undoubtedly familiar with your hot water heater not working as well as you’d hoped. On one hand, it’s to be expected that the biting colds of a lake-effected winter would at least slow your water heater’s productivity. On the other hand, though, you shouldn’t have to feel stuck with cold water just because temperatures are dropping; we live in the 21st century, after all.
In today’s blog post, we’ll be discussing how the Kalamazoo winter affects your hot water heater and what you can do to keep it running right.
How Winter Affects Your Water Heater
As the winter creeps in and your water heater begins to cool, it’s important to keep in mind the location of your water heater. Most water heaters are kept in cold, temperature-uncontrolled areas of your home, which means they’ll rapidly begin to experience variations in extreme heat and cold from the cycles of use and disuse during the cold season.
It’s important to keep this in mind because such great and frequent temperature variations (when combined with frequent usage at home) can lead to a high degree of strain over a short period of time. Simultaneously, you can also expect your energy bill to increase, since the hot water heater will require much more power to heat up the cooling water and maintain the ideal hot temperature.
How to Maintain Your Water Heater’s Performance
Alright, so that was the bad news. Ready for some good news?
The good news is that maintaining your hot water heater is surprisingly simple, with more advanced options available for those who’d like to be more thorough. To start simple, you can keep your hot water heating functioning by, well, using less hot water. Don’t worry—that doesn’t mean you have to start taking ice baths.
We recommend running your dishwasher less often as a first step; particularly, only when your dishwasher is full. As a second step, we recommend spending a few extra dollars on replacing old showerheads with newer, more efficient ones (which you can get for around $20). Finally, we recommend washing your clothes on the cold water setting where applicable, since washers can use a shocking amount of hot water.
These are just some of the simple steps you can take at home to keep your hot water functioning properly at home, even during the cold season. However, if you’re really serious about ensuring your hot water heater’s longevity, we recommend scheduling routine water heater maintenance. To schedule your professional hot water heater maintenance today, contact us at JP Heating & Air Conditioning today to make sure you and your family aren’t out in the cold this winter.
