My water heater is 10 years old. The salesman came to the door with a month of that ten year date to get me to replace it.
Do I need to replace it? A replacement would mean more payments.
A tankless system was offered but the total cost would be over $5000 dollar on a ten year payment plan at 10% interest.
Does anyone have a tankless system? What do you think of it?
Talk to a reputible plumber in your area for estimates. $5K is outrageous, IMHO.
Tankless water heaters are common in places where homes have limited space.
Unless you live in an area where utility rates are really high, I think you might be better off with an old fashioned hot water tank. Seems to me that once the water is heated, it down cools slowly (unless your water heater is in some weird place, such as a closet on the outside deck --I’ve seen that before). But tankless systems use “flash” heating to instantly bring the cold water coming in up to high temperature, and my thought there is that this instant heating uses a lot of power.
FWIW, I have always specified gas water heaters in my homes. It’s WAY less expensive than electricity! It seems to be about a third of the cost.
Yes , I have a gas heater.
I wonder if anyone has any insight into how long my current water heater should last if it is 10 years old now. They service agent gave me some scary scenarios that it might burst etc.
I’ve been in my house for 19 years and am on the third water heater, mind you it’s electric. I seem to recall that 7 years is the average age.
I think you’re on the last legs.
On the flip side, I’ve been in my house for 14 years, and am still on the same electric water heater. I had to replace the pressure release valve once.
I suspect the heater is original to the house, which was built in 1989.
That’s interesting. Mine have been rentals, maybe of inferior quality.
Have you done any maintenance like draining the sediment or replacing the anode rod?
A $5000 loan at 10% interest for 10 years will cost you $2,926.60 in interest alone. They’re not in the water heater business, they’re in the loan business. You’d be a chump to sign up for that.
Tankless water heaters are in fact far more energy-efficient than tanked. But they’re also a lot more expensive, at least for the time being. According to Consumer Reports, you can expect to save around $70 a year in gas bills with a tankless water heater. That takes a long time to pay off the difference in price.
You have a 3rd option if you have a boiler. Called an “Indirect Fired Hot water Heater”. This is a hot water storage tank that is attached to your boiler as a separate zone. The boiler heats the water, the tank stores it till you need it.
I have this system and have not touched nor worried about in 10+ years now. Only will work with a boiler.
if you have a furnace will not work, and before anyone asks. A boiler heats water, while a furnace heats air.
I have this one and I am extremely happy with it. Mine burns propane, but there is a natural gas version, too. I never ever run out of hot water even when multiple showers are used. It handily provides my whole house hot water needs.
When I was researching these, I found that the electric ones don’t really measure up to whole-house use. That may have changed by now.
Additionally, I got a pretty decent break on my federal taxes for the purchase and installation of the unit.
Note that they are more expensive to purchase and install than traditional water heaters, but they last a long time, and they are a lot more efficient.
“…The salesman came to the door with a month of that ten year date to get me to replace it…”
Door-to-door water heater sales?
Anyway, water heater lifetimes are quite dependent on your water - in my hometown, the city water is very hard and 5 years before failure is considered a miracle. Where I live now, we have naturally soft water and we’ve got over 10 years on our current one. Check with your neighbors to see what they’ve seen re: your water and heater lifetime.
I think going tankless would be a good long-term deal for our empty nest situation, but I haven’t looked into the cost/benefit yet.
The problem unfortunately is the upfront costs which tend to largely eliminate the savings you’ll make in energy - by the time the heater needs to be replaced you may not have actually recouped your expenses. A couple of links discussing this here and here.
I just had my gas water tank replaced and they told me that 8 years was about average (so, on par with what **Leaffan **heard).
I just read a small blurb in the latest issue of a magazine that Consumer Reports puts out (Smart Shopper) that on-demand water heaters still aren’t worth the cost.
But then again, everyone’s situation is different. I think you’d have to do a lot of research to figure out if it works for you. Research without the door-to-door tankless water heater salesman.
Depends on how good quality it is, what your water is like, how you have maintained it, etc. etc. etc.
Old gas heaters are fairly simple things and generally reliable. The newer ones are more efficient but have more things to go wrong - but the good quality ones are also pretty reliable, I believe. Efficiency can be something to consider if you think your current heater is driving up your utility bill.
Have you had any issues with your heater, or reason to believe it is on the way out? Is it a common brand where parts are affordable and readily available? Unless you think it is gonna go phut and leave you with major difficulty, the obvious thing do is to put away a few bucks each month in a ‘replace the heater’ fund. Then when it does finally start acting up and need replacing, you have most of the cash ready and have earned some interest rather than paying it. If it last another 10 years you are in the money.
Firstly, if they are resorting to scare tactics then that is a pretty good indicator to never give that particular companya penny of your money. Secondly in my opinion
$5K is bullshit, and probably constitues a terrible financing deal on top of an overpriced heater, unless you live in a mansion. In the UK a top of the range tankless gas heater capable of feeding a radiator-based full central heating system (with digital scheduler/thermostat) plus on-demand domestic hot water, five year warranty, blah blah blah would run you less than $2.5K including 20% sales tax.
I’ve never had a water heater do anything other than stop heating water and occasionally make annoying noises. In the UK the water heaters run both the hot water and the central heating, so you can have issues with a failed heater leading to a frozen house and burst pipes, but that’s a separate issue. Ask the rep to share any evidence he has that the water heater might be expected to burst during normal usage since you have a buddy who is a lawyer and would be interested in taking a look at it.
My gas water heater is 15 years old and working fine. I replaced it myself when the old one started leaking water onto the basement floor. It was a small leak and I let it go about 2 weeks until I got around to replacing it. An old water heater is not likely to suddenly burst apart.
You can do what’s right for you, but I’m gonna keep this one until IT starts to leak. (Or if the gas valve fails etc.)
By the way, ALWAYS make sure you have a working pressure relief valve installed on ANY water heater.
First check to see if there are any tax break incentives for energy upgrades. We had a tankless heater installed and got most of the money back in the form of energy rebates. I think companies usually only charge a lot for installation when there is an energy rebate involved and they know you can get your money back (win-win). Usually, the biggest expense for a tankless system is that they often need a separate gas line run from the meter. The unit itself is not any more expensive than a tank heater. It will save you a lot on energy, of course, but I can’t remember what the payback term is (seven years sticks in my head). Last time I had a tank heater replaced, it came to about $1100 with labor. Do that a few times and you’ve hit the cost of a tankless heater.
As for using it, it works great. You never run out of hot water, and it only fires when you turn on the hot water. The only area where you need to retrain yourself is if you have a single handle kitchen/bathroom faucet; try to remember to turn the handle to the ‘cold’ position when you’re done using it, as the heater will fire any time the water is turned on with the handle in the ‘hot’ or ‘mix’ position. The only maintenance is to periodically clean out the small in-line filter, particularly if you have hard water. There is also no danger of having a flood in your basement or garage.
We used to have a tankless water heater and it was a major pain because we have very hard water. The pipes where the water heated would regularly clog to the point where you could barely get a trickle of hot water. It was a big job to extricate those pipes and clean them out. Also, it meant that the oil burner would have to run all year round even when heat wasn’t needed.
It was drained once or twice when we were working on the pressure valve. Other than that, no.
I’m not sure what causes failure in a water heater. If it matters, I live in a 4 bedroom house, with a water heater sized for a family. But I live alone, so I don’t use nearly as much water as it expects.
That last part is key. My two failures came about 7 years apart when my kids started showering on their own. My daughter would spend 45 minutes in the shower every damned day. I too, am on my own now. One 7 minute shower in the morning, with a load of dishes, and a load or two of laundry per week.
I switched from a standard older gas tank heater to a small electric tankless heater 6 years ago. A smaller tankless electric water heater today should cost maybe 600-800 depending where you are; you’ll likely need a 200 amp service so there’s that cost to factor in as well. The plumbing is easy, but if you don’t do it yourself add a bit there too.
Electric tankless heaters aren’t good for some types of usage; the water takes a lot longer to heat up and you need a minimum amount of water going through to get the heating elements to turn on. Running the hot water at moderate to high flows for long periods of time (running a bath/shower, sink full of dish water, etc) it works great for. Short burts or trickles of hot water (washing hands, rinsing tooth brushes, etc) it’s not well suited for. I’d advise against using electric tankless heaters of you have kind of frequent or low-volume usage pattern - like kids and cleaning them and their messes up. Gas fired tankless heaters would heat things up much faster, but I don’t have experience with them. They also cost more by themselves and require much more extensive installation costs: venting, running or modifying gas lines, and so on.
Standard gas tank heaters shouldn’t be all that expensive; they’ve been around for along time and haven’t changed much. Of course, there are high-end or high performance versions, and you can spend thousands on them… but for every day use they really aren’t necessary.I don’t see replacing one with either a tank or tankless heater costing more than 1500 plus a bit of hands-on work. Unless you have special needs, I’d go with a basic model replacement of what you already have.
This isn’t true. Granted, you have far LESS chance of having a flood, but tankless heaters can fail and result in flooding. Mine did exactly this: one night while filling the tub my wife and I heard a loud electric HUMMMM-POP! sound followed by splashing water. A malfunction had occured somewhere in the power control unit causing one of the several wires powering the heating tube to overheat and melt right though the copper, shorting the heater out, and leaving a hole through which water started gushing out onto the floor. It’s a good thing we were sitting 15 feet away when it happened.