12 Volt Dc Water Heater?

Q: Pat you can forget 12 volt for heating water . uses way to much energy you might want to look int an instant hot water heater run on propane. this would be practicle and effecient

A: My sailboat has a hot water tank that can be heated by running the engine or plugging into dockside AC. I'm installing a wind generator with a regulator with a divert function when my batteries are fully charged. I would like to use the excess power generated to heat water. Hot showers sure are nice & I've got a water maker installed. Is there a 12 volt DC water heater element on the market I can install? Any other ideas? Let's see, the water heater has a 1500 watt element in it....If we could get one for 12V it would draw 1500/12=125 amps at 12v. Does your windcharger put out 125 amps? 1500 watts isn't much heating water...a good home water heater draws about 4000-8000watts at 240VAC. It's not practical for solar or wind to heat water. Got any place to put a solar water heating panel? They work great! A 1200 watt 120V heating element will have a resistance of 12 ohms. At 12 volts, this same element will only draw 1 amp, and consume 12 watts - not enough for any useful heating. It takes a _lot_ of electricity to generate useful heat, (see the recent threads re 12V hair dryer and coffee pot), so it is not practical to run a water heater - you would need 50 to 100 amps at 12 volts to make a useful quantity of hot water. Sorry about that. I asked my wife and she said that it was closer to 3 hrs than 1. If we turned it on in the morning, we had hot water by noon. As for the power supply, Audio tranformer, strip windings, rewire 12 volts center tapped #14 varnished wire, 64 volts center tapped same wire, flyback signal winding, 4 diodes, 2 transistors, 4 resistors, and 2 capacitors tuned to run around 1000 hz. About $20 or a little less.

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