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Our house is about 12 years old. We have an 80 gallon electric water heater. I am not looking forward to replacing it. We think it is slowing dying, since sometimes we only get tepid water even when no one has been using hot water. (We have 4 adults living here.) We are considering a tankless, but would like to see opinions of others. Thanks in advance.
I know there's a thread on them in the Plumbing forum if you want to check it out.
When my water heater sprang a leak about 6-8 months ago I was thinking about getting a tankless water heater, but then when I found out it was going to cost a few thousand dollars to get a bigger gas line put in so that there'd be enough "juice" to run the tankless heater, I decided that the tank kind wasn't so bad after all! I didn't get an official quote on the tankless since I couldn't afford it, but the rough guess they gave me I think was ~$2500 for the gas line work, then on top of that you've got the cost of the water heater and installation.
That sound steep for a gas line. We don't have gas here, I'd have to get propane. I was looking at the electric ones. I know gas is more efficient, but its really not an option.
I think the gas line is expensive because it's not a typical gas line, it has to be bigger than normal so that you can get enough gas to heat the water instantaneously as it goes through the tankless heater. I don't know anything about the electric tankless units but I imagine the installation would be considerably cheaper unless your house has really old wiring or something.
Something else that I didn't think of right away but realized later--here in earthquake country (or anywhere else that's prone to natural disasters) it's not a bad idea to have a regular old tank water heater--that's 40 gal of clean water if there's an emergency of some sort.
Beclu, DH and I just moved from a house that had a tankless water heater. The advertising on them is that they deliver hot water immediately because they heat the water as it flows. Ours didn't - water took just as long to get hot as with a regular water heater. Also, the water temperature varied during flow - showers would be hot, then jerk cold, them back to hot, as if there were bubbles in the line or something. We never identified a fixable problem, though. I wouldn't have one again. Just one girl's opinion.
The water not heating immediately has nothing to do with tank vs tankless--you have a certain length of pipe between the water heater and your shower, and once you stop running hot water, the water in the pipe is going to cool off. Then when you turn on your shower the next time, you won't have hot water until all the cooled off water in the pipe has run through. No water heater in the world can heat up water that's already passed through it and then been allowed to cool down.
The alternating hot/cold sounds very annoying though! I wonder if that was because it was an older tankless model? It's a relatively new technology so I wouldn't be surprised if older models had some issues like that, hopefully they've been addressed in the newer ones.
Eanders2, thanks for your comments. That hot/cold/hot stuff would be really irritating.
Ecrane3, One reason I was considering this is to move the heater. It is now on the far side of the house from all but one hot water use (2nd bath). Main hot water users are about 2 gallons of cold in the pipe. What a waste. If possible, I wanted to install one on the kitchen/masterbath/laundry side or at least closer.
We have 2 tankless heaters and do not get any temperature changes at all (unless someone flushes, etc and changes the water pressure - but any heater will do that. and ours recovers nicely.) For ours, we can even run 2 showers at once with no problems.
I do recommend that you carefully think about what & how many fixtures would be using the heater simultaneously, and size the heater accordingly. A too-small heater would only make you dislike them.
We are very happy with ours. It's a nice change to be doing dishes/laundry all day and/or have a houseful of guests and still have enough hot water for everyone to get a long a shower as they like.
Have one, but not in use at this time. Bought and installed in 1980 - had two settings - 80 or 90 degree rise. You could open every hot faucet in the house and have hot water EVERYWHERE once the line cleared. 125k btu - required 6" flue and maximum flue length was less than 10 ft.
There are some recycling models available now, so the hot is always available. And there have always been "point of use" electric ones. There is one of those in our lunchroom at the office - very short delay - the distance from the heater to the faucet is less than 3 feet.
thats what all the truck stops and campgrounds use .a large t.s can have 400 ,or more people take showers daily. i trucked in the 70's and 80's and they were in use then .i really wish i had one now.might put that on my gotta have list
