Hi,
How well do on demand point of use water heaters work? I've seen both mini-tank and tankless listed. They are not cheap but might be nice where hot water must travel a distance. This site lists some:
This has been worked to death about a dozen times on this group in the last six months.
Short answer: They don't.
Longer answer, the are horribly expensive. Even more so than one might think when you consider the necessity of re-wiring two or three parts of your house. Even more than that if you have to plumb in gas lines.
Conversely, a recirculating hot water system is (moderately) less expensive to install.and has no parts that will ever need replacing. Probably.
The one I have (tankless "3KW") works okay. If I run the water slowly, it's warm, so we don't have to wash our hands with cold water at the kitchen sink. It doesn't provided "hot" water on demand. They are susposed to put in a flow restrictor but we just run the water slowly to get warm water.
The problem with ours was getting enough electricity to the unit so it wouldn't trip the breaker on the circuit when the dishwasher or garbage disposal was operating at the same time. We had to have an electrician come out and set that up. That added $500 to the cost of the install.
Yes, it is nice to have warm/hot water at the end of a long run when you need it and these point-of-use heaters should do that.
Maybe they do; but the two installations (both multi-sink) that I've seen -- one in a church; the other in a commercial building -- both had problems requiring service calls to get them working after the initial installation. Checking more recently, they seem to be OK; but I wouldn't install one without expecting some problems.
Tomsic
*Gonjah, Do you recall the rate of rise on your unit? I have seen the same situation a few times.
41 degrees F at 1/2 GPM.
All the prisoners I ever saw in our jail used a hot plate.
My small gas Bosch works great , a hot shower in winter with cold incoming without the heater on high, the instal isn't easy and most don't follow the rules, and a few here don't have one but put them down. You have to measure gas flow with all competing appliances on and figure in a 15% or so drop in flow the gas company may give you on the coldest days, you need to know how cold your incoming water is in winter to know the rise you will get. I've been in many countries where tankless is normal, here you don't have installers that are familiar . I did most the instal myself so it was cheaper.
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