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Q. I have had a 1965 Levitt Devon model since 1965 and love it but we have to run the hot water a long time before it warms up so your suggestions a few weeks ago were of interest. However, I would like to try and understand why our hot water gets cold s o fast and wonder if you might suggest where I might obtain a copy of the original pipe layout for this model. As you know this model is a three bedroom rancher with a large recreation room between the kitchen and the garage. The water heater and furnace (downdraft hot air) are at the end of the two car garage with one wall being shared with the rec room. The floor is concrete. I would say the gas water heater is about twenty five to thirty feet from the kitchen sink. Waiting for warm water is frustrat ing my wife. It is like the hot water pipe is dunked in cold water. I would like to understand the piping in hopes of a simple sure. Can you help me?
A. In 1965 energy was cheap and builders didn’t really care how long it took to deliver hot water from the water heater to use points scattered throughout the house. The location of the utilities was more a function of convenience for the installers than for the utility of you, the eventual end user.
The water pipes were placed under the concrete slab and the temperature of the earth just below the pipes is cooling the hot water. The speed of the water through the pipes will deliver usable and tolerable hot water after the pipes warm up. But shut the water off and wait not so very long then go to reuse it and it’s cooled. It’s like in-slab hot water heat in reverse.
I have never seen a pipe layout for a house of that age and I would guess one never existed. The plumbers knew where to put the water heater and the sinks and tubs so all they had to do is connect them with pipe before the slab went down. And since Levit t was the first to use the now prevalent production method of construction on a big scale, if a plumber did one of a certain style that’s the way it was done on each and every subsequent job of that style house. I can still lay out a 26 by 44 split foyer in my sleep, a house design that covered this county in the 1970s.
The bottom line is that without doing something different you are stuck with this layout which is literally and figuratively cast in concrete.
The something different and not too expensive to do would be to stick a small point of use water heater under the kitchen sink. Pipe the hot water line from the water heater to the cold water inlet of the little heater. By the time you have exhausted th e little heater’s hot water supply, hot water will have arrived from the main water heater. Knowing that a gallon of water is 231 cubic inches you could do the math computing the length of the pipe times its diameter to get the volume of cold water that you’ll need to replace but my rough guess is that a 2.5 gallon heater will probably do. I found an Ariston 2.75 gallon heater online for $158. and a Rheem 2.5 gallon model for $215. They both use 120v so wiring wouldn’t be a big problem. Your long suffer ing bride has endured this situation for 42 years but help is at hand. And you’ll be using less water.