Tankless water heaters

[iFred]

I was reading info on this web site and saw something very cool. A tankless water heater. I emmediately did a search on ebay and they have them there. Very cool! so I bought one. I figure I can save at least 70% on my water heating costs with this one uint I purchased. Check it out!!!

The info... Energy Efficient Appliances

http://www.absak.com/basic/heat-appliance.html

Ebay search...

http://search.ebay.ca/tankless-heater_W0QQmaxrecordsreturnedZ300QQsorecordsperpageZ50

could not resist, so I bought this....Siemens Hotman Tankless Hot Water Heater

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3850344644&ed=1100296979000&ssPageNam



e=ADME:B:EOT:CA:3

[RedLance]

We had one of these in our old house,  We put it in  few months after we bought the house.  The old tank style one had filled up with crud, and you could only take about a 2 minute shower.  I wasn't paying the gas bill then, so I don't know how much it saved in gas use, but I loved being able to take nice long showers.  Plus, the unit takes up much less room then a tank style.  Installed it myself, no trouble at all.  Ours was this unit: http://www.controlledenergy.com/html/aquastar/design_features.html

The only problem we had, was we got one that has too low of a flow rate.  The water here is at about 50F, so to get it hot enough, we had the heater cranked all the way up, so it cut the flow rate down to about 2 GPM, which is about half what the cold flow is.  I see they have a newer one, that can do 3 gpm at maximum temp rise.  We will most likely get one of those when our current tank type one craps out. (New house came with a tank type)

Other then that, we used it for about 3.5 years, with absolutly no trouble.

I think they are the best way to go for water heaters.

Oh yeah, mine was a gas unit.

RedLance

[RedLance]

Oh, and we paid under $400 for ours at Menards.

[chibear]

We now have a Rinnai propane unit that supplies both domestic hot water and space heating for our 16oo sqft home on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

It's been in operation for around 3 months now. It is rated at 15 to 180000 BTU, approx. 8 gal/min at a 50dF rise. Even when I'm down in the basement, the unit is almost silent.

The only adjustment we had to make in going to a tankless unit is that we have to wait about a minute for hot water to be produced and reach the fixture, so rinsing hands & stuff like that is now done in cold water.

[chibear]

Obviously this won't be a problem for everyone. The Rinnai has the intake vent and exhaust built into a double wall pipe. We have experienced problems when wind chills excede -40C in that some exhaust gasses are pulled back into the intake, condense, and freeze on the cold surface and eventually block the intake, causing the unit to shut itself off, having to be restarted manually. Rinnai provided a new intake pipe that extends the exhaust about 8" beyond the intake. This is still not enough. I am going to further try to isolate the exhaust from the intake tomorrow without. Any ideas would be appreciated.

[chibear]

A further update to my previous post. If you live in a very cold climate be warned that Rinnai only certifies its units to -30C, Takagi only certifies their units to -5F. I haven't looked at the rest, but will assume they are around the same. These limitations are not available on the spec sheets and are often buried somewhere in the manual with a single sentence attributed to the limitation. The company that sold me the Rinnai was not aware of the -30C limit either, so it's buyer beware.

As for my situation, I have some ideas on how to overcome the problems. I have given them to my supplier and we will work on it together in about a week - hopefully before the next cold snap.