- What if I told you five percent of carbon emissions
come from this?
The way we move, treat, and use water contributes
a surprising amount of carbon into the atmosphere,
in part because of the inefficient way
we do things like heat water.
- So this is a heating element
from a typical water heater,
and the way these things work is they get really hot,
and they transfer the heat to the water.
So the water is boiling off.
Well, when you boil it off,
the minerals have to go somewhere, so they get fused
or plated or scaled onto this heating element.
And you only need about a millimeter or so of scale
to lose about 50 percent of the heating efficiency.
- Well, what if we could heat water
without a heating element?
This guy, Jerry,
has invented a way to do that.
He calls it the Ohmic Array.
- If every home in the United States
transitioned to this technology,
that would shut down
the 12 of the largest coal-fired power plants in the U.S.
- So the technology to do this better exists,
but getting people on board
is a whole different challenge.
What is that going to take?
This is Make It Count.
A series on environmental innovations
and the math it takes
to bring them to the masses.
You know how when you're heating water
to make pasta
it takes a while for it to come to a boil?
Watch this.
- One, two, three.
And there you have it.
It's that fast and regular heating elements
regular technology would take
45 seconds or a minute.
- How quickly we can heat water might seem trivial,
but how energy transforms from one form to another,
like kinetic energy into heat
or electricity into photons,
these transition points are when
we lose a lot of efficiency.
- In the water heating industry,
the old technology is still the new technology.
It's the same as it was since Ohm invented it in 1851.
So this gets really hot, transfers the heat to the water
like your toaster wire, takes a while to heat up,
takes a while to cool down.
What we do is we actually use graphite plates,
and they're not heating elements that get hot
and transfer the heat to the water.
They're just electrical conductors.
So we have multiple pairs of these things
that sit in the water, and we pass controlled
electrical currents through it.
And so our temperature control is so good
that nothing in the whole system
gets any hotter than the temperature that you want.
So if you don't boil the water,
you don't create the scaling problem.
- The way the Ohmic Array technology
heats water is unique,
but it's not the only tankless
water heater on the market.
In fact, all tankless or on-demand water heaters
save energy and water,
up to 2,100 gallons of water every year on average,
because you're only heating the water
you need to use.
But if tankless water heaters
are so much better than their predecessors,
why aren't they ubiquitous?
- The challenge is the installation part of it.
So for homeowners
with an existing electric water heater,
there are costs related to removing the old one,
installing a new one, and then connecting it
to a new electric power source.
- Even though they're more efficient,
these tankless water heaters
have a huge power requirement
when they're running,
up to around 100 amps.
Most homes have around
100 to 200 amps coming in total.
- In new construction, it's easy to run thicker wire
and to put a larger circuit breaker in the panel.
It's not a challenge at all,
but it's more of a challenge in retrofit.
- So for many homeowners,
this would mean rewiring,
retrofitting, installing new sub panels,
paying a technician to do this -
You get the idea.
- But in most places, you get your money back
and get a payback of like less than five years
with the Model 3, just by installing it.
- The average house spends about
four to six hundred dollars a year on water heating.
Systems like Jerry's
would save up to 40 percent on heating costs.
That's about 200 dollars a year.
Over five years, that covers the cost of the unit
and starts to pay off installation costs.
- So we're trying to make it easier for people
to do the right thing for the environment.
- Even though the economics of these systems
can make sense over the long term,
the cost is more than just your money.
It's your time and effort.
And that's where consumer inertia comes into play.
- It's new technology versus old technology, right?
It's difficult to get homeowners to change
the technology that they're used to
especially, in stayed devices like water heaters,
because they think of it as a utility
open the faucet, hot water comes out.
So there's an education process
to get them to understand that there's a better,
cheaper, faster, cooler way to do it.
- There are other environmentally friendly ways
to heat water, including solar and geothermal options,
that are also increasing in affordability.
Innovations like these mean that the next time
we need to install a new water heater,
the more efficient option
might also be the more affordable option,
which would incentivize the adoption of
these technologies on a global scale.
- Technology is advancing so quickly,
and there are so many
incredible opportunities that people have to save
water and energy and the environment.
And they're just becoming more and more prevalent,
and I'm just excited to be a small part of that trend.
It's really invigorating for me.