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Sidearm heat exchanger question

Started by yellowrosefarm, February 08, 2015, 07:01:24 PM

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yellowrosefarm

I just got a sidearm heater. Most of the installations I have seen have the top and bottom ports hooked to the water heater and the side ports hooked to the hot water lines from the Owb. Is that critical? Could you use the side ports for the water heater and the others for the OWB?

r.man

Should work either way, just might work better one way than the other. Do you have a large short term draw down of hot water? If you do then you should probably do the installation as close to recommended as possible. The other main thing with side arms is to avoid a possible bypass condition where cold water that is coming into the tank is able to flow through the side arm and out the house hot water feed. I have hooked up three and have seen a few more first hand and they were piped about three different ways. Remember that you are not obligated to pipe the hot water tank in any particular way, on my own house I swapped the house hot fitting with the pressure relief to get the distances I needed.
Life is too short or my list is too long, not sure which. Dec 2014

mapleveneer

To answer your question, it is not really critical, but will likely work much better piped in the conventional fashion.  The thermo syphon you depend on to circulate the hot water creates only an infinitesimally small amount of pressure.  Any increase in friction loss through fittings, bends, etc. is going to cut down that flow.  Be especially careful of any ups and downs in the thermo syphon piping.  Hot water rising does not like to go down.   Get your heat exchanger as low as possible.  Best is to have the entire hot water storage tank above the level of the heat exchanger.

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