Free Hot Water

How to heat your house and your water at the same time

When you have to do something and by doing that thing can accomplish another thing that you have to do, without any extra work, I consider that free.

When we heat our house with wood we got for free, that grows right out of the ground, we also heat our water. We can do this without using electricity through a process called thermalsyphoning.

Hot water rises, cold water sinks. Our wood-burning stove butts up to our bathroom, where our water boiler is suspended slightly above the smokestack of the stove.

I bent a three-quarter inch copper pipe in a spiral around the stove’s smokestack. The top end of the copper pipe is screwed to the top of our water boiler, the other side enters the bottom. When we start a fire in the stove, some of the heat that would normally be lost up the chimney is captured in the water inside the copper tube. As the water the heats up, it becomes more buoyant and ‘floats’ its way upward through the spiral. The warm water enters the top of the boiler, whereas the cooler water at the bottom ‘falls’ into the copper tube, where it begins to absorb heat and start its journey round and round the copper tube until it enters the top of the boiler.

If I start a fire and keep the damper open, allowing for a strong draft of air to enter the stove which creates a raging fire (fanning flames), we can heat enough hot water for two showers in about half an hour. This is significantly faster than if we heated our water by electricity. It’s free, because we have to heat our house anyway and our wood stove is the only method of heating available to us. It’s also more efficient.

Every time energy is converted, there is loss. In biological systems, this is great! Grass grows from the free energy of the sun, and a horse comes along and eats the grass. Horses are particularly lazy chewers, so much of the grass is undigested when it drops out of the business end onto a field where the bacteria from the horse’s stomach and the soil bacteria can feast upon the remains, thereby increasing the fertility of the soil. The horse’s body uses energy from the grass to digest the grass, and some of this energy is lost in body heat. In older times, this is why living quarters were connected to the stable to use the heat of the animals bodies to warm the home.

You can also see our water filtration system. We catch all the rainwater from our roof, filter it, and use it to bathe, wash dishes, and do laundry. We drink from only from a spring nearby.

When it comes to industrial methods of converting heat to electricity and back again to heat, any loss of heat is waste. When we use electricity to heat, there is still a fire burning somewhere, of course. Coal is burned to create heat which is converted into electricity, which is then converted back to heat on a kitchen top stove or a water boiler plugged into the grid. The further you move electricity through wires, the more ‘leaking’ (loss) of electricity. I can see this in action with our electric net fencing for the chickshaw.

When cooking with electricity, much of the heat is lost to the room, where more electricity, and therefore heat, is used to cool it through air conditioning. This is another great reason to have an outdoor kitchen. We built ours from scrap wood and a billboard.

So much of modern ignorance guided by ideology is caused, I think, by a complete lack of energy literacy. We’re so drowned in energy and the materials it provides that we’re blind to just how dependent we’ve become on them. The best starting place I know of to understand how energy and its role in the environment, and society, and the economy is Chris Martenson’s Crash Course on the topic.

Pavel, our friend, like to remind us that if you heat with wood, you get warm five times. Cutting the tree, sawing it, moving it, splitting it, and finally burning it. I’ve added two more. Taking a hot shower and eating Lucie’s goulash that’s been simmering all day.