The reduction in energy consumed by the storage tank water heater through conventional resistance heating had a limit. Therefore, we used thermoelectric technology. The thermoelectric technology which changes electric energy into the heat energy is commonly used as a heat pump. In this thermoelectric technology, we used a heat pump which utilizes the latent heat of the atmosphere. The other characteristic was to collect the heat which occurs from the power supply equipment of the thermoelectric technology device, in effect a CHP (combined heat and power) device. In this thermoelectric technology, an improvement of the energy efficiency can be expected. Initially we examined for a basis a bench scale model. As for the examination condition, the capacity of the tank was 3.7 liters, the temperature of hot water was 85/spl deg/C, the environment temperature was 23/spl deg/C and the efficiency of the power supply was 80%. On inspection of the results the new thermoelectric technology performed with a greater efficiency than the resistance heated storage tank heater. That is, with the thermoelectric technology storage tank water heaters about a 13% reduction in energy consumption was achieved. In 1998, the thermoelectric technology storage tank water heater was to be further developed on a full scale rig.
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