I am thinking of replacing the hot water system in my apartment complex with tankless water heaters. Has anybody looked in to that?
Here’s a great treatment of the issue.
http://www.waterheaterrescue.com/Longevity/tankless-water-heaters.html
I think you’ll decide that a standard water heater is preferred in most circumstances.
Thanks Javipa,
I was thinking of reducing expenses by saving on gas costs. But I can’t really get enough monthly savings to justify the higher equipment and maintenance costs. If a traditional water heater has a problem every shade tree variety plumber can fix it but tankless means you have to go to a high end plumber…you know the type with the shiny truck wears booties over his shoes when he comes into the house and wears a nice uniform. They charge high end prices also. Also tankless water heaters are not interchangeable. If my brand of tankless water heater goes out of business I will have a problem finding spare parts.
I have a 60 gallon water heater for each building. That keeps is small enough that it’s not considered a boiler with all the permits etc. The tankless would go in the same space as the current water heater. When any of the tenants turn on the faucet and the water flows the hot water flows. Just like at your house. The tankless would kick in at that time instead.
Also you have to consider the replacement cost since they don’t have a long warranty.
If any of you using electric. We have had good luck with the Westinghouse stainless water heaters. Lifetime warranty.
Not for me. I don’t think the initial cost can ever be justified by the savings in gas costs. For my money, it would be a set of 50 gallon Bradford white water heaters on gas. This is what I have on my own home. There are seven of us living here, and we would have to really try hard to dump all the hot water. I suppose if we started both dishwashers, both washing machines, and filled up all four bathtubs at the same time we might stand a chance running out, but that is what it would take. If you’re only talking like four or six units I would think this would be fine.
Moderator, I believe RRDeals is a spammer. He commented to all of the topics in this forum with one sentence, not really adding any value.
How many are you wanting to replace? Do you want to replace them all at once, or just as the tanks need to be replaced? Have you gotten any estimates on installing the tankless heaters? Installation can be high, depending upon how much plumbing needs to be done to make it work. For gas, the line needs to be a certain size. It could depend on codes in your city. My husband and I are fixing up a foreclosure that we bought to either sell or rent. The water heater was in the attic, which we thought was a terrible place for something that can leak. We got a tankless heater installed because it would fit in the laundry room. The cost was about $4000 for everything, and I think there was a $500 rebate from our energy company. This is in a single family home. In this case the tankless heater cost was far above what replacing the tank would have been, but we wanted the tank out of the attic and we hope the tankless will be attractive to buyers.
We are waiting to close on another home that has two water heaters that are over 25 years old, and not with totally correct plumbing. To replace the heaters and bring everything up to code, the cost approaches what one tankless would be. After the rebate it should cost around $700 more to go with the tankless. We will go with that option because the house will have 4 college students living in it and they could be using a lot of hot water at certain times of the day. The energy savings is a plus too.
It seems like doing a lot of apartments would be very expensive, but maybe you could get a package deal for getting a lot of them.