this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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If I'm getting a new water heater, I'd rather get a tankless honestly. I figure by the time I'm ready for a new water heater, the tankless technology will be even better and will be perfectly ready for me to use it.
Tankless still uses gas and it won’t make the water coming out of your faucet instantly hot. If that’s what you are looking for you want a recirculating pump or two.
Can’t you do electric tankless?
You can, but not as a heat pump so you wouldn't get all the efficiency gains and it will very often end up being more expensive to run than gas tankless in the near term.
The more and more hot water spouts you have the more expensive the tankless design is, especially for running costs and short life span. The recirculating with a water tank will last longer, cheaper running costs, and can be fitted in already existing infrastructure of water tank designed homes. In building a new home, it is possible to have tankless water heaters be better than water tanks. especially if you can use Solar Panels to make the running costs near 0.
My coworker bought one and had to buy a new electrical panel because it required 45A of electricity to run it meaning 3 dedicated circuits at 120V (5400 watts!). IMO an electric tankless is the worst of both worlds.
You absolutely can... And for smaller homes they're great.
Gas is fairly cheap where I live so that should be okay I think. Don't tankless water heaters generally come with recirculating pumps?
If methane gas is cheap because you're in the US, don't count on it staying that way; there are a ton of export terminals under construction, and when completed, they'll raise domestic prices in the US to match those on the world market, which are 2-3x higher.
I'm not in the US, and tbh I don't really use a ton of hot water. I think a tankless would still be a good investment for me. I'll also end up getting an air-to-air heat pump probably with a gas furnace as a backup for the really really cold winter days.
Electric tankless tends to be quite rare due to needing a lot more wattage than most household circuits can provide
Depends on the size of the house and the water needs.
I installed a totally electric tankless water heater made by a reputable manufacturer in my home on my own 11 years ago and just wired in a new 40 amp 220V breaker into the panel to support it.
It was actually very easy and plenty adequate for the water usage in a 2 bed / 1 bath home (including kitchen usage) for a 2 adult and 2 child household.
For more bathrooms or occupants it might be more difficult, expensive, or rare but in my case I did the whole job myself for under $350 including everything... But again, it was 11 years ago so I'd expect prices to be a bit higher
FYI that's almost 9000 watts of power to supply that thing, which is about 9 microwaves or 3 electric ovens worth.
That's not constant throughput though. That's absolute peak possibilities.
Editing to add:. FWIW, it also didn't increase the monthly average electrical usage at all... In fact, I believe I had a small reduction in the average... It was replacing a significantly older traditional 30 gallon electric water heater.
Tankless only shines if you have a large household where you need an endless supply of hot water. For everything else, they're going to operate the same or worse than a tank heater and also come with more maintenance.
I figure by the time I get tankless in probably another 10 years the tech will likely be more stable so it won't have nearly as many problems as they do now which is already less than they had before.
Thankless really never appealed to me, unless you have massive space restrictions. Water tanks are amazingly insulated so the loss is basically nothing and you'll almost never run out of hot water. Thankless always claim infinite hot water but it almost never works and it's way more complicated for what it's doing. Anyway just my 2c.