Home & Garden...

This was so ridiculously easy, I can't believe we didn't do it before.

This is the hot water heater before:

for the "after" picture, see above:

Make sure you leave any air intakes and valves uncovered (notice the perforated vent at the bottom - it's pretty clear on the instructions)...and wear gloves to prevent splinters from the fiberglass.

You can see two choices of hot water heater insulation at Low Impact Living. I went to Lowe's and all they had were the Thermwell R6.7 version (shown on top of the LIL page) which said it could fit up to a 60 gallon tank but it barely fit our 50 gallon tank - it actually didn't completely wrap around the entire tank - but it's pretty close.

We can expect to save from 4% to 9% in water heating costs from this $16.95 installation that took less than 1/2 hour.

Now onto the more difficult stuff.