Are you in the market for a new water heater? If you are, you should consider upgrading to tankless water heating, which provides homeowners with many benefits, including quick hot-water flow, installation locations that you can customize to meet your needs, and reduced hot-water costs.
Tankless water heating at work
When hot water is called for at a faucet or appliance, the following steps take place in a tankless water heater:
- Cold water flows through the tankless unit.
- A powerful electric or gas-fueled element heats the water.
- A quick and continuous supply of hot water becomes available almost instantly at the faucet or appliance.
- No energy waste occurs, contrary to that which occurs in a standard storage-tank water heater, which has to heat and reheat the water that it stores until you need it. This can account for as much as 75 percent of total water-heating costs.
Designing your tankless system
The design of your tankless system includes the number and size of tankless units that you’ll need, and the ideal locations in which you would like to install them. The two primary factors that you should consider as your determine these design elements are temperature rise and flow rate, as follows:
- The temperature rise is the total degrees that the element must heat the incoming water for it to reach your desired hot-water temperature.
- The overall flow rate is the total amount of water in gallons per minute (GPM) that a faucet or appliance supplies.
- Your household’s flow rate is the combined flow rates of the maximum number of faucets and appliances in use at one time.
- A tankless unit’s flow rate is the GPM of hot water that it can produce, factoring in the temperature rise.
Customizing your tankless system
Once you determine your necessary flow rates, you can begin customizing your tankless water-heating system by matching tankless units to hot-water outlets. This isn’t difficult, since tankless water heaters are available in different sizes:
- Large tankless units may use electricity or a gas burner to heat water. You typically install these where your previous storage-tank system was located.
- Medium-size tankless units are useful for heating water for two applications, such as your dishwasher and your kitchen sink.
- Small tankless units are convenient for sinks, such as a bathroom, or in a pool house or workshop.
Your goal as your determining whether tankless water heating is right for you and your loved ones is to calculate the best combination of units that will utilize the least amount of electricity. For help with those calculations, or for more information on tankless water heating, contact Mowery Heating, Air Conditioning and Plumbing. We proudly serve Greater Indianapolis homeowners, and look forward to helping you with all of your heating, cooling and plumbing needs.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
Mowery services the Brownsburg, Indiana and the surrounding areas. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!
