Re: Tankless water heaters?
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DieselDave said:
Anyone have experience with a tankless water heater?
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I'm looking at doing some remodeling and part of that moving to a tankless water heater. I'm pretty convinced tankless is the way to go.
We already have gas to the house, but unfortunately, the existing hot water is in the center of the house and the gas heaters must vent to the outside making it impractical to use gas. If your existing hot water heater is in a location that allows you to reasonably vent to the outside, gas is probably the way to go.
The largest problem with the on demand heaters is getting high enough water flow. If you consider a shower with an energy saving head is rated at about 2.5 gal/min, and the larger electrical on-demand units deliver about 4 gal/min, the larger electrical units may not deliver enough water flow to service two showers at a time. This may or may not be an issue depending on the tempature of your supply water.
There does appear to be a solution for this problem -- place two units inline. This is what I'm planning on doing. In this case, I might be able to squeak by with one unit, but I'd rather err on the side of having too much rather than too little.
The gotcha is that even though they will save you money on electricity, the larger electrical units need a boatload of power. It seems like a lot of units require something like 120A of power. Considering a lot of houses (like mine) have 200A services which are mostly utilized, it can be an issue. In my case, I'm considering going to a larger service. I don't have pricing yet (scary, I'm sure).
From what I've gathered, the tank is typically what fails in a tank based unit and as a result, the tankless units last longer, and are unlikely to leak upon failure, where the tank based units are likely to leak upon failure, causing secondary problems.
I came across this comparison chart which outlines the features of a lot of the electric units.
Let us know how things turn out or what you find out.
Thanks,
-john
Comparison Chart