Tankless Water Heaters
This is one of our favorite technological advancements, we’ll call it, in the home appliance field. The beauties of the tankless water heater are many. We’ll cover some of the benefits here with a brief introduction to how they work and why you will want one for your home. Since you are here, reading this article, we can assume that you are already interested in one. After all, you searched for the term. But, there are some things that you may be getting as a side effect benefit that we’ll talk about. Space savings in one such benefit of the tankless system. In fact, you can mount a tankless unit on a wall in a closet, without the worry of rusting out or leaking.
Basically, as the name implies, tankless water heaters are just that. They are systems that heat your water without having to store a huge amount of it in a mini-silo-like container in some area of your basement or garage or other area of your home. From a sheer catastrophe standpoint, the traditional water heater is a bad idea. In concept, it works great and is still used in far, far more homes than any other system. Hopefully, this will change as more and more people are turned on to the benefits. Some of these include energy savings and water conservation. That is what we will be getting into now.
Tankless Water Heaters and Conservation Benefits
The main reasons why tankless water heaters are good from an environmental impact are their energy and water conserving qualities. With a traditional system, what happens is that you have to store dozens of gallons of water in a large container and continuously heat it with either electricity or gas, in order for it to remain hot for use when you need it. You can control the ‘resting’ temperature of the water to something that uses less energy than having to be scalding hot, but this is only a minor savings when compared to an on-demand hot water heater. The tankless version saves energy by not having to continuously heat a large amount of water to maintain its temperature. Water requires a lot of energy to heat and cool. Solar water heaters can help with this aspect of conservation, but still lack in the water saving benefits discussed next.
Water conservation is another key benefit of the tankless system. Without having to store water and then run it until it is hot enough to shower or wash dishes with, you will have near instantaneous hot water. You can also get under-sink mount smaller reservoirs that can keep a small amount of hot water ready for immediate use. The tankless heaters work with either electricity or gas as well.
However, the difference lies in how the water is heated. The tankless styles have small tubes that run through the unit that is about the size of a medium to large backpack. These tubes are heated with coils or the gas and create hot water very quickly in the confined space of the tubes. One drawback that has been addressed in tankless designs and something that can be overcome with another unit is that of overloaded demand. In other words, a tankless system has been knocked for having a harder time with many users attempting to need water at once. Rather than draining a large container, the tankless system has had difficulties in the past of keeping up with demand.
You can get a tankless water heater in the range of $500-800 USD and have it installed by a plumber in no time at all. If you are fairly handy, you can even tackle the project yourself. If the government even thought it was a good idea to give tax breaks and credits for energy and water conserving appliances, it must be good, right? All kidding aside, credits or not, you will be better off for having invested in a tankless water heater.