When my dad and I were buying supplies to
install the water heater, we picked up this little item as well.
It's part of a two part system to insure you always have hot water
at the tap. The
second part (seen
later) is a valve that connects to the last water "station" on your line. In
our case that's the sink in the master bathroom. When the water at that
valve drops to a certain temperature, the valve opens up and
lets it flow into the cold water line. This part
is a pump that forces more hot water back into the
line. You never have to open the tap and wait for
hot water again. It also has a built in timer, so the pump only runs
during your high usage times of the day. That means if you try to
get hot water in the middle of the night, you might have to
wait.
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The first problem was I only
had two receptacles at the water heater and both my water
conditioners were
using them. I had to add another receptacle to
plug in the
pump.
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Here's the valve at
the sink. When I first installed it, I used the semi-flexi plastic
lines of the sink, but they
didn't work so well in the valve.
After replacing the plastic lines with steel braided, everything
appears to be w
working normally. I have this project marked as
in progress still, because I'm still calibrating the valve. The
black knob on the bottom adjusts how cold the hot water has to
be, before the valve opens and moves it
into the the cold water
line. Hopefully a few days of playing with it and we'll get it
right.
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It works pretty well for the master bathroom
sink. There's only a tiny bit of cold water when you
turn on the
hot (the test is to turn it on when you've run no other water in the
house for a long period of time
- over night). The issue is the
main bathroom sink isn't so nice. It's on the same branch, but
upstream,
and is supposed to also work like the master bathroom.
The kitchen, which is on a different branch,
doesn't seem to
benefit. This is to be expected and the fix is to get another under
sink valve for the kitchen.
Though I'd like to mark this
complete, I need to try and get another valve and figure out why the
main
bathroom isn't benefitting from the valve
downstream. |
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