Abstract
South Africa is an electricity-stressed country with a growing energy demand. Globally, hot water appliances are major consumers of electricity. Poor water quality for domestic purposes is a concern that may affect the efficiency of hot water appliances. Therefore, the Eskom Research, Testing, and Development Business Unit embarked on a study to examine total water hardness as a chemical parameter that may impact the power consumption of electrical geyser heating elements. An accelerated scaling method was developed to lime-scale the geyser heating elements for about 2 to 3 months. In addition, the geyser heating elements were tested with and without electronic descaler technology. The results showed that the accelerated scaling method developed for shortening the scaling time of geyser heating elements was successful. Furthermore, the results proved that scale formation of 1.5 kW and 3 kW geyser heating elements due to high total water hardness increased the power consumption by approximately 4% to 12%. This paper also presents energy-efficient electronic descaler technology as an alternative treatment of scaling for geyser heating elements. Keywords : electronic descaler technology, energy consumption, geyser heating element, scaling, total water hardness
Highlights
BackgroundWorldwide, population growth is continuously increasing energy demand
It can be predicted that, based on the results shown in Fig. 7, the scale formation in Experiment B2 caused the rise in temperature above the set point of 50°C, eventually increasing the power consumption
This research sought to investigate the impact of scale formation due to total water hardness on the power consumption of hot water technologies such as geyser heating elements
Summary
Population growth is continuously increasing energy demand. The main consumer of electrical energy globally is water heating (Ibrahim et al, 2014). The total domestic energy consumption percentage of water heating for the USA, Europe, Canada, Australia, Mexico, China, and South Africa is 11%, 14%, 22%, 25%, 29%, 27%, and 32%, respectively (Ibrahim et al, 2014). South Africa, in particular, was electricity stressed in the past decade, and this led to the introduction of load shedding by Eskom. The impact of water quality on hot water technologies has been studied since the 1940s (Stickford et al, 1984) and includes work by Arunchala (2011), Dobersek and Goricanec (2007) and Brazeau and Edwards (2011). The effect of scaling on energy efficiency has been researched by Widder and Baechler (2013)
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