Back around 1958 I lived in England with an English family. Their bathroom was upstairs, the hot water was in a closet in the bathroom. The water was heated by pipes that ran downstairs into a jacket in the fireplace. This worked quite well, the water circulated by convection; and every night the water in the tank was quite hot. But, there was no insulation around the tank--just a bare galvanized tank; and by morning the water was quite cool. During the day it cooled even more until the fireplace was lighted for the evening. It was almost like there was only cold water in the house. The only time one could take a bath was late in the evening. (There was an electric "immersion heater" in the tank, but the electrical cost was so high it was only turned for very special occasions.)

I suggested that the water would stay hot longer if the tank were insulated. My landlord was in the building business and realized that insulation probably would help. At the time in England not many houses or stores were heated in the winter. The people simply wore "Woolies" (wool sweaters) and endured the cold, even in stores and hotels. Insulation in England was not a big thing. Why insulate if it is as cold inside as outside? I talked about "Rock-Wool" and "Fiber-Glass" but those were not British terms. I don't remember Ice-Boxes or a Refrigerator, but I do remember setting milk in bottles outside the window on a ledge.

Gardening and Landscaping shops did have a material that was like expanded mica, used to mix in the soil to make it lighter. I think it was called "expanded vermiculite" but I am not sure. Anyway, it is a very light mineral sold in bags that would probably hold a couple cubic feet of the stuff. We decided to use it for insulation around the hot water tank. We simply put boards across the inside of the closet door and filled the whole closet with the insulation, covering the entire tank.

The effect was amazing. We had hot water in the morning and through out the day. I remember my landlord taking visitors up to see how we had "fixed" the hot water tank, and boasting about how great it worked.

In my Quartzsite home (Called a Park Model in Arizona) there is a small ten gallon hot water heater with some insulation I suppose, but the pipes going in and out of the tank are not insulated. When I felt the pipes the hot water outlet pipe was always quite hot. There is a switch in the bedroom for the hot water heater, so I turned it off at night and found that the water was not very hot in the morning. It was loosing a lot of heat over night. So, I decided to insulate it the same was as we had done in England; but I thought of something much cheaper and cleaner than the gardening stuff we used in England. I get the same result. I can turn the heater on for 20 to 30 minutes in the morning and have hot water all day and perfect temperature water for showering at night.

I got the same result insulating the hot water tank in Quartzsite. Other savings of hot water would be:

• Insulating the pipes from the heater to the faucet.
• Replacing the pipes with smaller and/or shorter ones, so less water would have to be run out to get the hot water to the faucet.

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