Tankless heaters were starting to appear 6 years ago when I was designing a
house and I looked into using them. After some analysis, my conclusion was
that, yes, they would be slightly more energy efficient; but that the
payback would be 8-10 years using natural gas as fuel for both types. I
ended up with a forced-draft high-efficiency tank type.

No doubt tankless heaters have improved since then and more brands have
appeared; but I was also concerned about reliability and noise. Tankless
heaters are certainly more complicated than the tank type too. A few years
ago, I was a guest at a friend's house. He had a tankless and it wouldn't
light up for the morning showers. We worked on it for an hour. He was an
enthusiastic user of tankless; but after a freezing shower and comments from
his wife and his guest, the tankless was removed.

TKM


"cjra" wrote in message
oups.com...
Just wondering on others' thoughts.

Does anyone in the US have a tankless water system? How do you like
it? Was it extremely expensive to install?

I've lived with them in the UK and love them, but they're not so common
in the US yet. We had decided we'd install one during renovation, but
the current water heater is the *one* thing in the entire house that's
reasonably new and in very good condition. Seems a shame to replace it
while it's working so well. However, we are still re-doing all the
plumbing, so it would make sense, one would think to install the new
system now.

Would costs be prohibitive to wait to install? As we're redoing the
entire house on limited funds, we have to pick and choose where we
spend the extra cash now.