On Tue, 22 Mar 2011 04:03:21 -0700, teabird wrote:
My setup is with 2 identically powered heaters and I always knew the
second heater wasn't doing as much work. In my situation, the first
heater's elements went out first, presumably due to overwork.

Hi Teabird,
Your setup seems similar to mine. Two equally sized series water heaters
(in my case, they're both propane as we have few city utilities out here).

What we can do, I surmise, is simply set the first water heater to do
half the work that the second water heater is doing.

The only way we can do that, without plumbing changes (which isn't the
point), is to set the temperature to half the work load of the second
heater.

As far as I can tell, that's our only option for optimizing the system
that we're stuck with (without plumbing changes).