3 Things They Don’t Tell You About Tankless

on the build show today three things they didn't tell you when you bought your tankless water heater now this video is intended for those of you that already have tankless or if you're considering tankless let's say your tank has has reached the end of its life you're thinking about going tankless now this video is going to be helpful for you as well now first let's talk about the benefits of tankless i think the number one benefit of tankless is endless hot water really there's no limit to how much water you can get out of this tank whereas a traditional tank you've got a certain amount of run time and then boom you're going to start getting cold showers until that tank can fill back up with hot number two there is no standby loss so in theory we should have a very very efficient unit you go on vacation it's not making any hot water for you and lastly size and placement i love how tiny these are even though there's a giant engine in here this is a 200 000 btu boiler inside this tank 199 close enough and if you're in the south you can put them outside so there's definitely a space savings when this friend of mine pulled their tank out of their house and put this in they gained back a couple square feet you know four five six square feet in the main part of their house that's a big deal with going tankless and putting it on the outside but there are a couple things that are downsides that you need to know about and that's what we're going to talk about today today's build show all about tankless let's get going okay the first thing they don't tell you about these units is there's no standing pilot which means that if the power goes down let's say if this gets unplugged or this plug is no longer hot i got no hot water you can open your faucets all you want but nothing hot is going to come out of this tank so if you've got a brown out if you've got a storm anything that's going to knock out your power means this tank is not going to function for you if you have a traditional tank you're going to have 50 or more gallons just sitting there and it's going to take a while for that to get cold so if you lost power for you know 6 or 12 hours you could still take a hot shower before you went to bed now you can't overcome that right we could plug a generator in the backyard run an extension cord plug this plug right into it and now boom we're gonna fire back up but you need to know about this before the storm comes and you realize wait a minute why is there no hot second let's talk energy efficiency and cost of operation now if you look at the energy guides on these units you think that you're going to save a lot of money on your gas bill let's say but in reality i don't know that truly happens you know for instance at my house i've got a tankless i've got one teenager and i've got three soon-to-be teenagers man they can take long showers and without that hey it's getting cold i need to get out feeling i don't know what's stopping them which means that those numbers in theory that you're gonna save i don't know that that happens in reality the best way to save money is to conserve and not actually use that energy so set a timer and say look i'm gonna take seven minute showers and get out during that time make it happen get out of that hot water and then you're actually gonna save money i'm trying to do that actually with my younger kids right now i set a five minute timer and say guys you get five minutes to get a shower and that bell goes off you get out i'm hoping that as my boys become teenagers they'll be more conservative with their time but that's something that i think is not necessarily true about these tankless units you buy them for the endless hot water but you don't necessarily come through when it comes to savings all right and the third and final thing they don't tell you about when it comes to tankless is that these units do need service they do need maintenance you know because the burner is so big these are just shy most of them are 200 000 btus that's the threshold for needing a different type of permit to put one of these in 199 000 btus that is a lot of heat and with a copper boiler in there it means that these create scale and you need to flush them on a regular basis now if you have soft water if you have a softening system you're not going to have to do that very often but like i am where i'm on city water that's pretty hard and i've got a big family i need to flush mine every 12 months or it scales up and when that scale gets thrown off into my plumbing system bad things happen i have to end up removing all my aerators on my faucets and in my case i have a thermostatic valve in my master that has a screen on there so if i cast scale off into my plumbing system i actually have to pull my entire shower valve trust me you do not want to do that you want to maintain these every 12 months now you can do that yourself and i've actually made quite a few videos about that process but if you're going to pay a plumber to come out and do that you got to know that's a 150 maybe 200 service because it's going to take them at least an hour plus their time getting there so your savings again are going to be reduced now if you care if you compare that to a traditional tank where really all you need to do is drain it on an annual basis and you do need to think about changing your anode rods every couple of years very less maintenance costs quite a bit less than a tank loss guys hopefully this video was helpful for you check out my past videos about how to flush a unit and i'm actually after i'm done shooting this i'm going to talk about maintenance i've got all the tools and equipment out i need right here so we're going to do a full service on my friend's tank and show you how to do it so stay tuned for that video i'll have a link in the description once that's live if you're not currently a subscriber hit that subscribe button we've got new content every tuesday and every friday 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Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 2,045,988

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Id: 8RFuFBI3r2c

Length: 5min 56sec (356 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020