Apr

7

Tankless Hot Water Heaters: Two Secrets to Being Happy with Your Heater

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With tankless hot water heaters all the rage now, you may be surprised to learn that many owners of these units are not so happy with them.  You can avoid many of their problems, though, by mastering two secrets to being happy with a tankless heater. They are: (1) be willing to adjust your habits and (2) be sure the installation is done right. Sounds easy enough, right? It is.

Be Willing to Adjust Your Hot Water Habits

If you have always had hot water from a tank system, you are used to certain things that will change when you get a tankless system. The hot water will arrive a bit differently. This is easiest to understand with an example: If you are getting ready to wash some dishes by hand with a tank system, you might wait a short while for the water to get hot, but once it starts coming out of the faucet hot, it will continue that way. Many people wash dishes by keeping a very slight trickle of hot water coming into the sink, so they can rinse as they go along.

With a tankless hot water heater, your wait for hot water initially is typically somewhat longer than with a tank system, as the heater will be sensing water moving through it and then beginning to heat it. The small-trickle method won't work because tankless water heaters require a minimum flow of about half a gallon a minute or more. This depends on the particular brand and model. Takagi tankless units require .5 GPM typically, while some other brands need more water.  So you have to run more water all the time, which is wasteful of both water and energy.

So supposing you decide to change your strategy. You will just turn the hot water off and on as needed. This is the greener way to do dishes anyway, but you may be surprised when the water coming out of the faucet is cold. The tankless heater stopped heating water when you turned the faucet off, and now it will have to get up to speed again, with another wait while cold water is coming out.

This means that an adjustment in your dish-washing methods is called for. Either rinse your dishes as you go along by being willing to use partly cold water, or just use cold water, or pile your clean dishes up and rinse them all at once… or in batches, depending on the space by your sink.

An adjustment like this isn't difficult to make, but it's good to be aware beforehand that there will likely be a variety of such adjustments. For example, depending on the size of your unit, you may have to wait to do those dishes till someone else gets out of the shower.

Tankless Hot Water Heater Installation MUST be Done Right

If you surf online and read owner's comments about their tankless hot water heaters, you will discover a good number of complaints. Many of these complaints are because the installers didn't get everything right. They didn't use large enough gas line. They installed a tankless heater in an unheated attic in Vermont and the pipes burst. They didn't run the vent correctly for a gas heater, and the unit acts up when it's windy outside or at other times. They didn't set the water hot enough. I could go on, but you get the idea. Some mistakes seem really dumb but others are more subtle.

Why are there so many bad installation jobs? Not many people are experienced in tankless wather heaters. Furthermore, a good number of the installations are done by plumbers, electricians, and skilled homeowners just doing what they are used to doing rather than checking the manual to see what is actually needed. (You can download most manuals from the internet, by the way.)

So if you get a unit installed and there are problems, have the installation thoroughly checked over. As one man commented online, "As a service provider for over 2 years I have found 95% of the over 150 heaters that I have serviced had installation issues. Once the issues were rectified the complaints disappeared."

Changing some habits and being careful about installation… these are your two keys to being happy with a tankless hot water heater.

I hope you are finding the information you need. To keep up with the pages I'm adding, you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Best wishes, Lou Wright

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