Mike likes to work a lot like a computer processor. He works on one task then goes to another before completing the first, then another before completing the second, maybe a fourth before completing the third, then eventually makes his way back to the first one, works a little bit on it then goes to another one – never really finishing any of them. He says he has to work this way to minimize his trips to one of the big box stores. I think he works this way because he can’t decide which project he wants done first. The last few weeks Mike has been lucky to have a very experienced plumber come and work with him on plumbing our house. Forcing him to complete one project: getting us hot water again. In order to have hot water you have to have a heat source – our heat source is natural gas.
So there was a whole lot of this to run:
And then this:
To get this:
And that last one? It’s my favorite. (That’s the G rated one, I withheld the re-creation of The Titanic pic).
At the beginning of the project a lot of people asked us if we would be changing to tankless gas. And we were like:
Honestly, we were secretly wishing we could, but outwardly against it. Tankless gas water heaters have pretty mixed reviews. People seem to either love them or hate them. We pretended to hate them because originally changing the water heater wasn’t even an option. Our old one worked fine. However, when we made it to pre-wrap we realized we had no way of venting our old one.
Well, I gave Mike some options but he was like:
You can vent our tankless through pvc through a sidewall – no chimney, b vent or hole in the roof needed. See how we vented it?
With the second story directly above the old one Mike said it wasn’t, “aesthetically possible to vent the old one.” I think he found his loophole to tankless.
He’s using my words against me. Aesthetically. That’s my word.
It’s big enough to run multiple showers and appliances at one time. Supposedly. I ran as many as I could: one shower, one washer, three sinks, all without a hitch. All those people who don’t like tankless probably just don’t have a Noritz NRC98-DV – or one that is properly rated for their use. There is a slight delay to getting hot water, but we had a delay before because of the long copper run. We ran a separate line for a circulating pump to ease the delay, but we won’t be adding the pump unless we find it necessary later.
It’s pretty ironic that while all the gas lines have been run in the house I still have to deal with no heat in the trailer. Last night I dreamt I had fallen into the ice cold ocean waiting to be rescued and awoke to a cold trailer because we had run out of propane. With Mike gone, I had zero energy to grab the propane tanks, get the kids in the car and go fill the tanks. So, I did what any normal person would do: I grabbed my hair dryer and blew it under my covers. First world problems.
We went to a tankless water heater a couple years ago and never looked back. That thing is amazing, and when I had the cover off to do the normal yearly maintenance on it, I can only explain that it works by magic. It looks like a space ship in there!
Before tankless, we could not even fill our jacuzzi tub over halfway before running out of hot water. With 4 teenage girls in the house(along with 2 boys), in about 8-10 years, we figured we might as well plan ahead for those years. Now, we can run the washer, dishwasher, tubs, showers all at once and no one runs out of hot water. Our plumber friend said it also came with a recirculator so when the temp of the water in the pipes drops, it recirculates fresh hot water, so there’s no delay to hot water. The digital temperature setting on the unit is nice too, can lower in the summer when we don’t need scalding showers to thaw us out!
The progress looks great, keep up the good work!
We installed a tankless in our last house (Mike actually installed it) and I miss it so much. We are already talking about swapping our current one out for a tankless.