Heat Pump Water Heaters Save 1 ton of CO2 Annually

Making Them the Perfect Earth Day Technology

If we were to make a clean tech Mt. Rushmore in honor of the technologies that make our lives better while reducing our impact , we might carve core technologies like solar panels, electric vehicles (EVs), LED light bulbs, and heat pumps for space heating and cooling into a mountainside. However, we would be missing one key player. This Earth Day it’s high time to add a new face to this clean tech Mt. Rushmore - the heat pump water heater (HPWH).

While most people hardly ever think about their water heaters in general, let alone as a key tool to fight climate change, it’s time we elevated this humble technology to the iconic status it deserves.

Heating water is very energy intensive. It accounts for 17-32% of a typical home’s energy usage and is the second highest energy user in a home behind space heating (and in multi-family buildings it’s the highest energy user).

HPWHs are three to five times more efficient than gas or electric resistance water heaters which means they reduce carbon emissions by a lot. They also run on electricity, not fossil fuels, which can (and is) being decarbonized quickly.

The Advanced Water Heating Initiative (AWHI), did a deep dive and found that replacing a gas powered water heater with a HPWH can save more than 2,000 pounds of CO2 emissions every year. 2,000 pounds (or 1 ton) of annually saved CO2 is an enormous amount, especially when you consider that once a HPWH is installed the only action that’s required (besides easy maintenance) is to continue to take luxurious showers or in our case, bubble baths.

Once you install a HPWH, you can save 1 ton of CO2 emissions every year while continuing to take long, luxurious bubble baths.

What does 2,000 lbs of CO2 equate to?

It can be hard to conceptualize what 1 ton of CO2 looks like so here are some helpful analogies. 1 ton of CO2 is the same pollution emitted when a person takes a round trip flight from LA to New York or drives a sedan 4,000 miles (all calcs taken from Carbon Footprint calculator)

Or if trees are your preferred analogy, 1 year with a HPWH is the CO2 equivalent of growing more than 17 trees for 10 years.

HPWHs save not only a lot of energy and money but perhaps most importantly, for the future of our world, they save a literal ton of CO2 every year they’re in operation.

Which is why they deserve their very own special spot atop the Clean Tech Mt. Rushmore. This Earth Day get yourself a heat pump water heater. Here’s a link to ENERGY STAR’s HPWH Installer finder to get you started.

Also - Spread the good news with Advanced Water Heating Initiative’s one page factsheet about these savings, it’s available at www.advancedwaterheatinginitiative.org/resources.