A few months back we were approached by a large home improvement chain with the offer of an employee to write an article about tankless water heaters. Since our approach is to generate as much of the content on the site as possible, we suggested they donate one and I’d test it out. The house I recently bought was going to need a new water heater and it seemed the perfect option. While the home improvement chain was not willing to acquiesce, my wife and I traveled down the tankless path ourselves.
After a lot of discussion, we decided to forgo the tankless water heater. Here is the general reasoning behind our decision.
The upfront cost of a tankless water heater was going to be prohibitive. New wiring was needed to bring it up to code and handle the massive electronics necessary to control the system. When the water heater gave out, it was replaced as part of our home warranty, meaning we didn’t have to pay out of pocket. From what we researched, the payback on the system would’ve been somewhere in the 22 year range and they only have a 20 year warranty. If we had built the house from the ground up and were being intentional about the systems installed, perhaps we would opt for a tankless heater. As a family (aside from our 3 year old who is still figuring it out), we tend not to run the hot water for very long if we can avoid it, making the endless supply of hot water a bit less important. However, the constant heating of a tank of water (and one that is not externally insulated) doesn’t make a lot of sense either. We discussed a hybrid system that would’ve been more efficient, but the plumber kept telling us it was going to be “another 2 weeks” until it was available. Obviously that wasn’t an option.
In the end, we made numerous environmentally friendly (and several sustainable) upgrades to the house, which you can read about under the tag, Home Renovation. Ultimately we decided to put our money into these fixes instead of the tankless water heater.