Me and my late friend GB installed a Bosch natural gas tankless in a beauty shop. The Bosch has a paddle wheel generator the runs the electronic igniter and controls. It's the only type of tankless NG water heater I would purchase for myself because it will work when the power is out. It supplied plenty of hot water for the beauty shop. ^_^
TDD
Well they can, but they also can with other types of water heaters too. With my old tankless oil fired boiler you could shower forever and my daughter tried to. Very often I'd go in and turn the boiler off to get her out of the shower.
I heard that one on the radio. during ice storm 2003. Clever idea, and does some good.
. Christ> during power outages here people have run a
garden hose thru the home with a slow flow of
hot water to provide enough warmth to prevent
freezing.....
>
More importantly, in case of any gas or power interruption a tank heater has some reserve hot water. When a tankless unit fails in winter, nothing's left but cold, cold water. Sadly their rate of failure seems much higher and rightfully so, they are more complex and run very hot. Also, if you're the slightest bit a survivalist that's 50 gallons of stored water you don't have with a tankless. Depending on the disaster, of course. (-:
Community Association Underwriters of America, Inc. (CAU), one of the largest insurance providers in the United States for community associations, residential and office condominiums, cooperative apartments and homeowners associations says on their site:
There are tankless that don't require AC power to operate. As for gas interruption, that occurs so rarely that it's not a factor, at least not here. I've never had a gas outage. And if the unit itself fails, tank and tankless are about the same. You're typically not going to know that the unit is no longer operating until you don't have hot water.
Sadly their rate of failure seems much higher
for anything they sell.
I assume that's a "vote of tanks." I agree, I've been twiced stumped by "we don't have spare parts but we'll give you a trade-in of 1/10 the purchase price for a "refurb." That was a Flip shirtpocket HD video cam. I bought 4 Samsung factory refurbed and much superior cameras for nearly what the Flip cost alone.
I don't like tankless for another reason and that's the often required heavy-up of the gas line to the house. The bigger that is, the faster you get into trouble if there's a break in the line. There's the point I mentioned before - tankless fail without any backup. If a tank fails, you might even get one or two more showers out of it. My tank heater failed when I was covered with dirt from digging trenches but I could still wash the dirt off and not freeze doing it.
I've since installed a reducing valve (sort of accidentally) and this waterheater has way exceeded it predicted point of failure. We also have a low-flow shower valve and my wife stopped taking baths (not showers for you comedians out there!). According the CAU post, emptying the tank in very cold weather probably shortens its lifespan.
Agreed. Based on a post I read here, when a huge winter storm knocked out power for about a week I used a 100' old style super-thick rubber hose attached to the laundry sink and snaked up through the bedroom access panel and coiled underneath the mattress, exiting into the bathtub.
Set to a trickle it provided enough warmth to sleep comfortably and the excess filled up the bathtub and went out the overflow drain. I am hoping when this water heater fails, I can replace it with another pilot light model and not a piezo-electric one that requires electricity to operate. As you point out, the pilot light consumes very little gas and what it does is worth it to me to be able to stay in my own house in situations like that. Making a gas water heater dependent on electricity to save pennies doesn't seem like a good tradeoff.
Come to think of it, Bob, you were the one that gave me the idea to do that and it does, indeed work quite nicely. A bit of a waste of water, but a flood from cracked pipes would be worse.
they can get a
My neighbor was sure something in the street was leaking and causing her water bill to soar. It was her daughter and brood letting the water flow, flow and flow. The kids turned on the backyard hose and left it going all day. You'd be surprised at how much water can flow from a dinky little garden hose.
That's pretty funny (as a guy who didn't have to pay the bill can say!).
Meanie! (-:
All tankless with power vent require line voltage to operate.... to run the blower....
I dont like running out of hot water, when we moved here the house had a 30 gallon tank... i froze getting a shower...
it currently has a 75 gallon 75,000 BTU tank. i never run out of hot water....:)
75 gallon is really over kill but they stopped making 50 gallon 75,000 BTU heaters. the 50 gallon fit the space better....the bigger tank cost more to purchase but lasts far beyond it warranty, probably because thermal shock is less....
tankless clog and they sell cleaning kits to run acid thru it to remove sediment and tankless are pretty complicated, unlike regular tanks.
lets say a regular tank heater costs 600 bucks and has a average life expectancy of 10 years the cost is 60 bucks a year or the cost of a single decent candy bar a week, today perhaps $1.30 each...
thats super affordable and regular tanks rarely cause a problem till their end of life leak......
"Robert Green" wrote in message news:ku80ej$qep$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me
OTOH, if you are on a well, piezo vs pilot makes no difference. If there is no electricity there is no water.
During the hurricanes of ought four, we were without power for a week. It was August and sweltering...I prayed to all the gods I could think of for rain so we could get naked, go outside and wash. It did, we did.
It's indeed questionable how much, if anything, you save by going up the technology curve with water heaters. As I stated in another post, every time I look at this, it does not appear worth it to me to get a more advanced, energy efficient water heater, eg power vent, tankless, etc.
In the other post I gave numbers for two GE 40 gal water heaters at HD. One a typical basic water heater, the other a higher efficiency power vent. It was about $500 more upfront cost for the more efficient one. Using DOE numbers, it would take 14 years to recover the extra upfront cost. And that doesn't factor in the time value of money. Taking that into account, you'd likely never recover the money. It also doesn't take into account that the std water heater uses a chimney, the power vent is a direct vent type and it also requires AC. So, if you're going from regular to power vent, the install cost difference could add hundreds more to the price. Then instead of 14 years, it could take
20+ years to get your money back. Well beyond the expected life of the unit.
Not necessarily complicated, but complex. And 3 or 4 tankless units gets PRICY and requires HUGE gas and/or electric service to support more than one running at a time.
And there is a difference between a "tankless" and a "point of use" water heater.
And using them in tandem adds un-necessary complexity. Otherwize you get half hot and half cold with a parallel system, or both need to run together all the time.
A well insulated tank unit of adequate size, with a smaller point of use tank heater (5 gallon-ish) at washroom or kitchen if they are at the far end of the house to avoid running a lot of cold water through the lines to get hot water, can be a very effective and price competetive set-up.
At the price of a properly installed, decent quality tankless - and the required gas or electric service, you are going to install multiples to "zone" a system - or add redundancy?????
Not very likely - especially with the "tightwads" on this group!!!! And I'm proud to be one of them. Doesn't make any sense, long term or short term, to install multiple "tankless" units.
a word of warning about electric tankless. they draw so much power you will likely need a 250 amp service just for heating water, and a second service main for everything else.
upgrading electric service might require a utilty company upgrade. possibly a new transormer and new local service lines....
upgrades for gas tankless can be pricey too. might need a new main gas line from the street, a bigger meter with large line directly to the tankless..
my best friend ran into a similiar problem. he converted both vehicles to CNG, and gasoline. he did this back in 1972 during the first oil shortage. and installed a large compressor to fill the tanks..
he talked to the gas company, and found they would charge him a fortune for a higher flow line at his home, for filling the vehicles tanks.....
so he slowed the big compressor way back to limit the gas flow, and installed some large tanks for a quick fill ability....
he happens to live in a older low pressure gas area, with no regulators at the meter.
get this if he ran the compressor at normal speed he could of pulled vacuumn on the neighborhood gas line, and inverted the pilot lights. possibly causing a neighborhood explosion
It's a good plan, but I don't think thermal shocking is the main cause of water heater failure. It could be one element, but only an "autopsy" would determine that. I think the main failure causes are scale/sediment build-up and corrosion. Both are closely related to how much water flows through the heater. I think scale/sediment resisting heat flow and causing the metal to fatigue is a bigger culprit. But that and corrosion go hand-and-hand. I never replaced an anode, and doubt I will. Never had a tank that didn't last 15 years before leaking. They're going to lose thermal efficiency as they scale up, so a new one is in order anyway. Small expense as home expenses go, and most here can DIY.
I suspect that the numbers will improve over time, but I agree, right now it doesn't seem to make too much sense to trade in a technology that's tried and true for something quite a bit more complex. Especially if the payoff's a long, long time away. Or never.
I'm never surprised that such calculations (by the vendor) are optimized quite agressively and leave out the things you've mentioned that could easily push the cost very much higher. I'd only go for a tankless if I didn 't have to heavy up the gas feed AND I really needed the space that a standard tank heater takes up.
Manufacturers often live in a dream world. Take MS. They marketed the Zune player to compete with the iPod. It was a disaster. Having learning nothing from that they created the Surface RT tablet to compete with the iPad and recently took a $900 million write-down of unsold inventories of that product. The SRT tablet is a remarkable tale of groupthink gone wild.
The saddest part about MS's tablet offering is that 10 years ago they were leaders in the nascent tablet world but their commitment to desktop PC's caused them to abandon that lead, and perhaps the eventual leadership of the industry. People repeatedly say things on surveys that sound like this: "If Microsoft expects us to throw over working PC's every three years, I am going to try an Apple product - it couldn't be any worse!" The number of times they've had to extend support for XP pretty much proves people are damn tired of upgrading tools they know how to use for a new OS that's based on a totally different paradigm.
Good point. I was assuming that all tankless heaters needed AC power. The addition of the generator turbine indicates that they used to, and it was a bad idea for reasons we already discussed.
With AC powered tankless models, when there's a power failure, you *know* you're out of hot water whereas a tank will usually give at least one shower before it quits, and that's often enough to bridge any power disruption.
If you have an electric tankless, you can not generate enough power to heat water. A 5 KW generator will run most tank water heaters. You can cut off about everything but a few lights, run the water heater for a while and then cut it back off and get another quick shower or two.
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