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Time with HW reaching top floor

Is there anything that can be done in a house that does not have a hot water recirculation line to decrease the amount of time it takes to get hot water to the top floor faucets? The house is four stories, built in 1996, and has roughly 4000 ft2. The new 75 gallon gas water heater is located in a conditioned basement. Once that water gets hot to the top floor the homeowner says there is plenty of it, and just takes about three minutes of running water to do so. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. thanks to all.
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Comments
I can't believe that it would take 3 minutes for the water to get up to the top floor.--NBC
That said, short of installing recirculation lines -- which work splendidly well, but are energy hogs and are a bear to put in if they weren't done in the first place -- the only thing which I know of which will help is to insulate the dickens out of all the hot water feed lines. If there are fairly long runs in the basement, however, you could put pumped recirculation on those -- that would help some.
Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England.
Hoffman Equipped System (all original except boiler), Weil-Mclain 580, 2.75 gph Carlin, Vapourstat 0.5 -- 6.0 ounces per square inch
3 minutes is not un-believable with large pipe sizes and low pressure especially.
Tankless water heaters also add to the "wait" time.
trainer for Caleffi NA
The magic is in hydronics, and hydronics is in me
Use a "CrossOver" valve and a smart timer based circulator. You don't need dedicated return recirculation lines, it uses the cold water supply as a return line back to the water heater. Simple retrofit application and more than one valve can be used with one circulator.
The circulator can also run based upon a schedule, but it learns your schedule must like the Nest thermostat learns to create a heating schedule based upon when your home. This way the electrical costs to operate will be very minimal, say in the range of 6-10 dollars a year.
taco-hvac.com/products/systems/instant_hot_water/hotlinkplus/index.html
Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England.
Hoffman Equipped System (all original except boiler), Weil-Mclain 580, 2.75 gph Carlin, Vapourstat 0.5 -- 6.0 ounces per square inch
This is evident in hot water heater heating, especially a converted gravity system. 2nd floor pipes heat with valves off even after pump is off.
There must be some horizontal piping here that might dip down and prevent that passive gravity flow. If it were obvious in the basement then something could be done. But otherwise not.
Thanks to all
ZepFan, when you're done with the install, let us know how it works out for you.
Enjoy