Tankless

We decided to move to tankless water heating at our house. So rather than a huge drum water heater that I’ve had in every home of my life, we have these small wall-mounted rectangles.

Part of our original impetus was that we’d have “instant” hot water. Which… turns out isn’t really a feature of tankless water heating directly, so, derp. There are some actual advantages though:

• The water is heated on-demand, so you don’t “run out” like you can with a tank.
• It’s much more efficient, not keeping a huge tank of water hot at all times.
• If they break, they just break, they don’t break and leak out a giant tank of water.
• They are generally more “modern” and have modern features.

Modern features like being “smart” (e.g. connected) and sending you a message when they need repair and such. Another modern feature is that some of them have a “recirculating pump” built into them, and that is actually the feature that buys you the “instant” hot water.

Ours didn’t have the recirculating pump(s) built-in, so we added that separately. And! Wait for it! It doesn’t work that well. Our main shower is as far away from these heaters as you can possibly be: across the house and up a level. I haven’t done anything scientific, but it maybe bought us a minute or two of speed. What took 5 minutes to heat up before now takes 3? Better, but it ain’t instant.

I still feel pretty good about the change though. Not because of any of the standard features though, but because:

• It’s a brand new unit that we purchased ourselves, meaning we have all the paperwork and warranty information and such.
• It was installed by a local company (our normal plumbers) as guaranteed work, so we have that established relationship to use if there are any problems.

Those are important things to me. I like to know if anything goes wrong there is an obvious, established, guaranteed path toward resolution.