Looking for tankless water heater answers

The national conscience is beginning to turn to conservation. Global warming and rising energy costs are hot news buttons these days. One way to go green is by replacing your old water tank with a tankless water heater when the time comes. Or you could do it before warning signs; the out of the box EER drops off significantly over time.

Installing a tankless water heater comes with a new set of numbers for finding the best choice for your home. Some models are actually no more expensive than storage tank heaters; other models are more expensive, 2-3 times more.

It’s not an easy task to find the right hot water heater. There is a lot of misinformation floating around. The comparison I’ve seen thrown around a lot is that tank water heaters are the cheapest and electric tankless are the most expensive.

That can be true but it all depends on what you are comparing.
The Department of Energy, which was a good source of consumer information, has redone its site so that it is hard for the homeowner to find any useful information about tankless water heaters. The only graph I see now doesn’t even include tankless models but there is help in doing some estimates. It is worth a visit for energy saving tips and a general description of the workings of a water heater.

These are the figures that DOE once used as a benchmark.

Percent energy efficient
Electric tankless .95-.99
Electric storage .90-.95
Gas tankless .80-.85
Gas storage .60-.65

So if your concern is to be green then it looks like tankless, of course electricity comes from coal, oil, nuclear and wind. Will that ratio change in the next 10 years, it seems highly likely.

There are other good choices to remember and will be talked about later: heat pump water heaters, solar powered and something that GE will soon introduce, a hybrid.

But back to the topic: Since electric power costs more than natural gas there needs to be an equation that answers a home owner’s question, What is the best water heater for me?

For that you need to be able to compare energy cost for your local, how much water you use and installation over the life of the unit.