“But my parents don’t use hot water that much, this won’t work for me.”
A common misconception is that hot water in a house isn’t used that often. Nothing could be further from the truth, but we understand why you may not think so. Most homes built in the last 50 years mix hot and cold water at the point of use. For instance, consider a standard kitchen sink faucet with the single handle.
When you turn on the water you generally are getting cold water and hot water mixing based on where you position the handle.
Because the CarePenguin Sensor sits on the hot water pipe, it detects this demand for hot water regardless of how much hot water is being mixed. When no water is being used, the pipe cools down. When water is used again, the pipe instantly heats up to the temperature of the water in the hot water heater or tankless on demand hot water heater.
The average homeowner uses some hot water as much as 6-10 times a day in one form or another. In the CarePenguin app, we show these as activities in different ways. The first is an easy-to-understand status of the location.
For instance, in the above example, we can see that Dad got up around 6:49 am and has used water 4 times so far today (10:20am).
CarePenguin has many other features that make it easy to track that things are normal at the location being monitored. In other posts we will explain those features!