We have all experienced it : before having hot water at the faucet, cold water arrives. This could be something of the past thanks to a Spanish invention, AquaReturn, which enables its users to save both water and energy.
AquaReturn recirculates the cold water around the pipes until the desired water temperature is reached. To the company, their invention could save up to 8,000 liters per year per person, ie. 120 euros per household.
Spread to the whole country of Spain, water savings could reach 350 million cubic meters and carbon dioxide emissions could be slashed by 2.42 million tonnes.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a blog post on the same topic caught my attention. According to the US Natural Resources Defense Council’s Staff blog, more than ten percent of hot water drawn for showering in a typical home is wasted waiting for hot water to arrive. Here is an extract of this blog post :
In a 2009 modeling study, researchers estimated that over 10% of all the hot water drawn for showering in a typical single-family home is wasted waiting for hot water to arrive. With Americans taking over 200 million showers a day, that’s a lot of water and energy literally down the drain, of no benefit to anyone.
Using EPA estimates of shower water use, that’s about 280 million gallons of hot water wasted each day — water that has been heated by a water heater, but then allowed to cool as it sits in long pipe runs that are not insulated. This amount of hot water is greater than the total amount of all waterused on an average day in the city of Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth-largest.
I guess the United States could benefit from AquaReturn too.
To conclude, this small invention with large benefits is to the official website easy to install yourself. Please check out their official website for more details.
