On Demand Hot Water Heater

My family and I have been living with an on-demand tank-less hot water heater (HWH), or instant HWH for nearly a year now. There are several things that I have learned during this time that I believe are good to share with future buyers.

1. Having a tank-less HWH does not mean that you will have instant hot water when you turn the faucet on. The water still has to travel thru and heat up the same pipes as the tank type water heater that you used to have.
2. The bigger the better. Even in the best of circumstances when the second shower is cut on the first will cool and need a little recovery time. While this is not objectionable it is a bit exciting when you are rinsing your hair in the winter and the water gets cooler.
3. We live in Virginia and have always enjoyed low electricity rates. This combined with what are reasonable gas rates make the payback for the unit about 20 years. I do not believe this to be a deal breaker. In our case there were space issues that the tank-less helped with. It is nice to be able to turn it down in the summer and up in the winter saving gas costs.
4. Summer water temperatures around 115 degrees allowed for cool showers and clean dishes. When I set the temperature below this I noticed that the dishwasher did not work quite as well. The winter temperature is now at 125 degrees and we may move it to 130 as the daily outside temperature drops lower coming into January and February.

SET THIS HIGHER TEMPERATURE ONLY IF YOU ARE COMFORTABLE THAT YOUR FAMILY UNDERSTANDS SCALDING AND POSSIBLE INJURY FROM THIS HIGH TEMPERATURE.

5. Environmental friendliness? Maybe. I do know that it is a choice for each family that bears a high upfront cost especially for replacing a tank HWH. My plumber stated that this was the first one they had done as a replacement because it costs 2-3 times as much as a conventional tank gas HWH.
6. Electric tank-less HWH use a lot of power, somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 amps or more. Your panel box would need 6-8 blank spaces to accommodate the breakers and the electric meter would look like an anemometer in a hurricane.
7. The aerator, that's the piece on the bottom of the faucet that makes the water stream pretty, needs to 1.5 gpm or higher. We had a .7 gpm aerator and it did not let enough water pass thru the system to ignite the HWH. You may want to limit your water usage but this can get you in trouble.

Hopefully this will give you some more choices in deciding about a tank-less HWH.

Please contact me at

www.cshadedesign.com

if you have other questions