Speaking specifically of heat pump water heaters - I will absolutely cede that they are more efficient, but holy _crap_ they take forever to recover. My previo

Speaking specifically of heat pump water heaters - I will absolutely cede that they are more efficient, but holy _crap_ they take forever to recover. My previous water heater was a 70 gallon conventional electric. It didn't have quite enough hot water to get everyone through showering when we had extended family over, but it recovered reasonably quickly so that we only had ~ 30 minute gaps or so in waiting between the person who felt it get cold first and the next in line. Pretty reasonable. Ours was about 20 years old and we also wanted a bunch of other plumbing work done, so we decided we may as well bite the bullet and get a new one. We replaced ours with an 80 gallon hybrid (electric + heatpump). We figured the extra 10 gallons would probably actually completely negate the need to wait between showers for those last people, so we were super stoked. The reality is it exacerbated matters drastically. The refresh rate on our old water heater apparently was almost good enough to keep up with sustained usage between 7 people. The current one runs out of hot water out of 2 and takes well over an hour to even have enough hot water for a single next shower. I tend to take pretty long showers in the morning - like 20 minutes or so. I use a CPAP and clean my mask, I brush my teeth, I brush my invisaligns (which is why I do my teeth in the shower - it's impossible to scrub invisalign braces and not fling infinite toothpaste flotsam everywhere), and I wash myself (which honestly is the fastest part - I keep my hair next to non existent and just do a body wash from head to toe, rinse, and leave. The point is that the 20 minutes I spend in the shower, with a low flow water reducing showerhead, still means my wife gets to get a cold shower an entire hour later. However, from what I was told, there are new regulations regarding electric hot water heaters; namely, you can't get over 60 gallon tanks with a conventional hot water heater. Apparently people are getting around this by buying light industrial ones, which don't have this limitation. I wanted to try to cut down on energy usage AND I was keen on the idea of having a heat pump in my garage, transferring the heat in said garage into the water, thus leaving the garage cooler. It's like a really inefficient air conditioner for my garage, but given how hot that gets in the summer and how little I spend time in my woodworking shop, I wanted to leap at the chance to maybe make it a better environment. All of this is a long winded way of saying it may win on efficiency, and it does have a number of compelling secondary features about it, but it also still suffers from poor refractory performance. If you have one as well - do you notice issues like this? Perhaps the one I got is faulty or just ... not good.