Electric hot water - leave on or turn off?

[jhh4smh]

When dry camping and using gas, we always turn off the hot water after our morning shower.

Now that we are parked for a while in a park, should we leave the (electric) hot water on all the time or turn it off as we did before? Is it more harmful to our hot water heater to cycle on and off or just leave on?

[Guest Wayne77590]

My personal opinion is that it is your choice. If you use only electric it will take a slight while longer for the water to get hot, but you can run both the electric and gas at the same time to decrease the amount of time it takes to heat, or if you want to take showers back to back - run both. When parked and on CG power I just leave the electric HW on all the time. Rarely do I use propane, except to quickly heat the water if we have just pulled in and need it.

4/24/09 Edited: If you are going to store your RV for any period of time, and are going to, for some reason like keeping a trickle charge on the batteries, then make sure you turn the water heater off, both Elect. and Propane. Without a water source you will eventually boil out the water and melt the element or worse.

[stevesandidge@yahoo.com]

leave it on, just like at your house, it'll turn on n off when it needs too. top wayne is right fire up the gas when you are gonna be useing aLOT of hot water, but other wise leave the electric on. now , just remember to shut it off if you are gonna drain the water heater, or it will melt the element.

steve

[retiredblade]

I always turn mine off after showering or washing dishes, propane isn't cheap. A few days ago I upgraded my hot water heater to gas, electric, so now if I am at a camp ground that is not metering my electric, I think I will leave it on!

[tbutler]

I'll weigh in on the side of turning off the water heater! That is if you really want to save propane, turn it off. If you don't care about the propane, leave it on. It really depends on your use of water.

If you are going to turn it off, do so before the last shower! Then let your wife shower last! If you shower serially, one after another in quick succession, there may not be enough water in the hot water tank for the last person. If you have some time between showers, there will be a full tank of hot water for the last shower and you should be able to turn off the hot water heater before the shower and not notice the difference.

By doing this you will be storing a tank full of cold water which will likely warm up (if the outside air temperature is above the ground temperature) even if only slightly. If you turn the water off after the shower, the water heater will have been working hard to heat that water and then you turn it off with a tank of warm water which will cool. You will have wasted the propane used to heat that last bit of water while you were showering!

Now, here is the kicker. You probably will save water and propane by showering serially, one after another and then turning off the propane at the end of the second shower. The reason is that you will likely use most of the hot water in the water heater and the water in the water heater will be mostly cold water. You will have avoided having to send hot water through the pipes to the shower twice.

For even more fun, you could turn off the water heater before you shower together! But then you might run out of hot water and there goes all the fun.