17 ms·
On-demand water heaters are really only feasible if you have natural gas or propane heat in your house. The electric ones are quite feeble and expensive to ope
by gjem97 9y ago
On-demand water heaters are really only feasible if you have natural gas or propane heat in your house. The electric ones are quite feeble and expensive to operate. This is a good idea. My intuition though is that the additional up-front costs of this type of setup would be enough of a barrier that adoption would be slow.
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoMy brother uses an on-demand electric water heater he built himself (he is an ee) and it works just fine. Also, it's less expensive to operate than a tank-type heater, as there is no cooloff loss.
- freedomben 9y agoI tend to think cool off loss is much less of a problem than people think. The insulation around those heaters is incredible. I once turned off my water heater before leaving on vacation, and when I got back after a week the water in the tank was still probably 10 to 15 degrees F warmer than room temperature.
- RandallBrown 9y agoI had a bad water heater in my apartment that kept turning off. It would take me 2 or 3 days to notice that there wasn't any hot water because I could usually get a few hot showers out of it before I noticed a problem.
- frankus 9y agoAlso in a lot of cases (cool climate, electric resistance heat, water heater inside conditioned space) that heat isn't really lost, it's just offsetting heat that would have come from something like an electric baseboard heater.
- mavhc 9y agoI have an on demand 10kW water heater, it's my shower.