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Message: <blockquote data-quote="guywhofishes" data-source="post: 333521" data-attributes="member: 337">OK, so here's a graph of what happened with the gravity loop.[ATTACH]52350[/ATTACH]I was using about 5 kwh/day for the hot water heater. After installing the gravity loop (Dec 16 or so) you can see the energy use jumped to nearly 3 times as much. I thought that was a bit much - how to achieve a happy medium???I bought a this $31 controller for reptile cages, etc. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01486LZ50/?tag=nodakangler10-20" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01486LZ50/?tag=nodakangler10-20</a>On March 21 or so I placed the temp sensor of the Inkbird on the return gravity loop near the heater. I hooked the Inkbird controller up to one of those zone valve controllers for boilers that I installed into the return ($70 ebay).The zone valve opens until the return water gets to 90F, then it closes until it drops down to 85F, then re-opens. This is equivalent to those water circulators that monitor temperature and don't get carried away by circulating unnecessarily. In addition, this $31 Inkbird controller allows you to set what time you want to be controlling or not (so lizards etc. experience cool nights). So I set it to start allowing the gravity loop at 5 am and end the gravity function at 8:00pm (I think those are the times... it's all programmable but forget)Anywho... it looks like I might be saving 5 kwh/day which at .069/kwh is $10/month - by not running the loop at night when it's not needed. So the $120 bucks or so I spent on controlling the loop will be paid off in a year? I suck at math so I could have this all muffed up. Ha ha.-guywhoisOCDsometimes- - - Updated - - -So the final system sent my hot water usage from something around $17/month to maybe $27 or so. I can live with that - especially in winter when heat is heat - it doesn't get wasted. Summer is a different animal.</blockquote>

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