Enbridge Gas - Tankless water Heater

[tboy]

Cost benefit of the loss over the cost of electric makes it do able.

Plus I would be replacing a tank heater.

oh yeah, definitely.....

Maybe someone else can confirm this (rub?) but I hope you add the tankless when your tank heater goes. I feel it can't be energy efficient to throw out an appliance or water heater before its usable life is over.

 

[seth gecko]

Payback on a refit tankless water-heater is, in most cases for most residential applications, MINIMUM 15 years.
ConsumersReport did a study on them and they calculated over 20 years payback.
These aren't as efficient as everyone seems to think....only about 80% efficiency, whereas a power-vent tank water heater is approx 65% & the conventional tanks that go right up your chimney are about 60%.
There are some true high-efficiency tank style water heaters that are over 95% efficient, but they share some of the same drawbacks as a tankless does as a refit.
Somebody with better computer skills that me (that would be EVERYBODY!!) might try to find the ComsumersReport article on tankless online.
I'm in HVAC & I 've been trained by Rinnai (and others) on their units.....great technology, but unless you're building your house from the ground up with one of these things in mind, you probably won't be any better off with it.
P.S if any aforementioned computer guy can find an online manual for one of these units, its worth checking out the delta T vs flow rate figures.

 

[Danolo]

In a house I owned a few years ago, i installed a small tank type heater.

The reason I did this was because the bathroom was a long distance from the main water heater and it took a long time for the hot water to travel from the tank to the taps. So, I bought a small tank heater from Home depot and installed it in the crawl space under the bathroom, where all the plumbing was, and it supplied only the bathroom.

The disadvantage was that if I took a really long shower, it would take a few minutes for the tank tor recover for the next person. Generally we found it took 15 minutes, so getting ready to go out was usually a carefully balanced issue if we both needed showers.

The advantage was that I wasn't keeping a big tank full of hot water when we were away. In fact I installed a switch to turn off the heater when we left the house, after the last shower. Then when we needed the hot water in the bathroom again, I could just flip it on, wait 15 minutes and it was fine.

In my situation this was also an advantage because I only had a 200 amp service, so I was able to wire it into the same circuit that the dryer was on. My switch, noted above, was a double pole switch that switched the power to EITHER the hot water heater OR the dryer.

A couple of months later I installed a similar switch for the main hot water heater and we got quite used to the habit of turning the switch off when we finished with the dishes, etc.

It worked well for us.

 

[oldjones]

We went tankless last fall—the same unit also heats our house using the old cast-iron rads—and have no negatives to report.

We 'waste' a measured litre of unheated water in the kitchen before the fully-heated water arrives. That's faster than the old tank, and, just as before, that standing-in-the-pipes-water may still be warm from last use. But we pay zero to heat water for the 10-12 hours we're at work, and the 8-10 we're sleeping.

You will become conscious of inefficiently laid out plumbing runs. You'd already spent your money before the water moved using the big tank, but now, you're only spending when the tap turns; positioning the small, tidy unit right in the bathroom or kitchen would save the most. It kills me that the tank's right behind the basement sink wall, but I wait while the water runs up, over the ceiling down behind the tub, then around the walls to the sink. Ca-ching. That will be fixed.

No probs about capacity—and our city supply is still old 1/2" lead—we've stopped worrying about dish and/or clothes washers running while showering. If there's water at all, it's plenty hot.

Too early to tell about the house heat, degree-days year-to-year and such make the arithmetic daunting.

 

[tboy]

Hey Rub: what about the energy waste (?) of replacing an existing tank before the end of its usable life? Any info on that, you always have something up your sleeve.......

 

[tboy]

You mean, did I calculate the cost of the energy Stelco used to smelt the steel, that the paint company used to power the air compressor to paint the tank, the cost of railway transportation, gas to power the truck (or diesel?) that delivered it and decided that I would be a good green citizen and keep paying Enbridge rental on a ten year old tank that took up too much space and kept water hot while I am away for days at a time?

Like I give a shit !

Why don't you do the calculations for me pal? Then argue something about it! <wink>

Then I can just go ahead and get that big fucking tank out of my furnace room and move my porn stash to the empty space!

Dude, I asked an honest serious question and I asked you in particular because you had all the data available for the cost vs. energy of oil/gas vs corn.

Shit, remind me to never ask YOU a fricken question again....and frankly, you were one of the few people here on terb that I actually respected, well, that's gone out the window now (like you give a shit to use your words).