Water Heater Melting Fridge cover

[Zyriah]

Yes, we have screening over our vent, too, but that didn't seem to have any affect on the heat/melting.

[rbrent]

I have a bug screen over my hot water vent and I haven't notice any melting of the plastic on my fridge vent cover. maybe it holds enough heat away from the plastic!

[moallen]

Here's what I came up with to deflect my water heater's hot exhaust. It's something called a BBQ Grill Mat and is some kind of high temperature plastic/teflon. It's for laying over a grill grate to make cleanup easier. Supposed to be good up to 480 degrees. I cut off a piece 5" x 13" and inserted it about an inch behind the top of the cover.

I was going to use aluminum flashing but decided that might be too sharp and dangerous. This stuff is thin and rubber-like.

After a full heating cycle, the mat was way too hot to touch. But it was unscathed. In any case, I don't plan to leave it on when I'm not around. For that matter, I always turn the heater off when we're gone anyway.

hot-water-heater-shield.jpg (62.27 KiB) Viewed 4013 times

[Zyriah]

Yep, that's exactly what we've noticed lately. And, we had the same plan to rig up some sort of metal shield/deflector to put on when we are set up and store when not in use. Somebody was clearly not seeing the big picture when they designed the locations of these.

[moallen]

I have to take what I said back - about my frig plastic vent not getting hot enough to deform it from the hot water vent below. Actually, it is showing signs of melting. My wife was using hot water and it was really blowing super hot air out the vent, and it was rising right up into the frig intake vents. That can't be good on the old frig when it's struggling to stay cold.

Here's a pic of the 24rls setup. Not the greatest design. I'm going to get some aluminum flashing and make a deflector for the hot water vent. I'll have to take it off when going down the road.

vents.JPG (19.15 KiB) Viewed 4027 times

[Houston Remodeler]

Our cover panel reminds me of myself; a little wrinkled but still completely functional. Not as good looking as new, but not about to be replaced.

[moallen]

Wow - I'm not seeing that "yet" on our Launch 24rls. Our plastic frig vent cover is right above the metal water heater cover, and there isn't any gap between them. I can see a potential problem if the water heater runs a long time. I know its metal cover gets too hot too touch. Do you use a lot of hot water? We only turn ours on when we know we're going to need some hot water, so it never runs for a long time.

The hot water does get too hot in my opinion. I did help ours a little by applying some cpu chip heat transfer paste between the thermostat and the tank wall. It's a 140 degree thermostat but it will go higher if the thermostat isn't making good contact with the tank wall.

[Zyriah]

We have a 2015 Launch and have recently noticed that the heat from the hot water heater is melting the outside plastic fridge vent cover. Has anyone had the same issue? We're going to look into getting some sort of metal hood to deflect the heat. Thanks for any other ideas/suggestions.