Re:Halfbakery
by gjem97 on Friday November 10, 2017 @08:56AM
(#15669859)
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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
My 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.
Re:Halfbakery
by freedomben on Friday November 10, 2017 @11:04AM
(#15670753)
I 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.
Also 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.
Re:Halfbakery
by RandallBrown on Friday November 10, 2017 @01:30PM
(#15671852)
I 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.