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I am looking at a house that may be the ONE... but discovered the existing Water Heater is in the ATTIC?!?!?!? WHY?? this is a disaster waiting to happen.
in the back of my mind I have always said I want to go tankless - 1 less thing to worry about (I've been through a couple of water heater failures in the last 25 years... one in a third floor apartment. Don't want to do that again.
Is this a complicated project - removing the water heater from the attic and installing a tankless somewhere on the main (Single story house) level? or can the tankless be in the attic too?
Both our homes in Mexico have had tankless w/h. Because our climate is mild, the w/h's are installed on exterior walls. For servicing issues, I would want them somewhere easily accessible.
The problem with relocating a water heater is that you either have to redo a lot of your current plumbing or you'll have much longer to wait for hot water. I would just leave it where it is. I don't see why you couldn't have a tankless heater in the attic, but some places have strange building codes. A local plumber can certainly answer that question.
Wherever you install it see if you can take the opportunity to well insulate the supply lines. We love our tankless, but it still takes a few for the hot water to reach us since the supply is not (yet) insulated.
I have yet to see a tankless water work as advertised. The Rheem is supposed to be the absolute best at supplying hot water. It peaks at 125F AT the tank. By the time it reaches places like your kitchen, it might not ever get warm. For a dishwasher to function correctly, it MUST have 140F water to sanitize the dishes. I've never seen one make 140F water even those that are under the sink. A whole house unit works on temperature rise. If the incoming water is 70, the unit might have a temp rise of 50F which gives you 120F water. But if the incoming water is 40F during the winter, you'll only get 90F and that's AT the tank, not at the fixture. Like I say, I've been in the business for over 50 years and I've never seen one that works as advertised. And it doesn't get majorly cold in my part of Texas. Jeez, I don't even own a coat, just a wind breaker is more than enough. Best of luck with it if you go that route. It will be an expensive lesson.
Dishwashers heat the supply water, so getting it from, say, 120 (which is where we set the tankless) to 130-140 is not hard.
^^This
We have had ours for 8 years without a problem. It replaced 2 tanked hot water heaters that died a horrible death when we had heavy storms, water flowed in the crawlspace where the hot water heater was located, the power went out, thus the sump pump didn't work and they drowned <please everyone bow their heads in respect>
We have had tankless in our last two houses. In California I installed it myself and hung it on an outside wall to free up space. In Michigan we got a Rennai which requires a certified Rennai installer. They messed up the installation, but it still works. The Takagi we had in California was more powerful, but it was also warmer there. Still the Rennai struggles to keep up at times, even in the summer.
With Tankless you need a large natural gas supply. If the water heater is far away form the meter, you will need a huge gas line.
The difference in time to get hot water to the shower or faucet is miniscule. The tankless is generating fully hot water in about two seconds compared to a tank heater maybe half a second.
We keep ours set at 140. That hurts if you turn on full hot, but it also allows us to use more different fixtures at once since each one is only demanding 75 % or so of its valve capacity to be hot. (In other words we mix in more cold which mean greater volume (what most people call pressure).
We were originally going to put one tankless in the attic and one in the basement. Our contractor talked us out of that saying one would be plenty. He was wrong. The one in the attic was a PIA because we had to run gas lines up there and because of the distance, they needed to be huge. We also has a catch basin with a drain planned to sit underneath it just in case a leak occurred.
We have been using our Rennai for 12 years and never had a leak or any other problem that could not be resolved by unplugging it and plugging it back in (except that the vent pipe was installed too low and gets buried in the snow sometimes, but we have learned to clear it when we shovel the driveway and to cut weeds away form it during the warm months). The Takagi in our California house is still there. We put it in around 1999 or 2000, I think. It may have been as late as 2002. To the best of my knowledge it has never had any problems and never leaked. It has been a few years since I talked to the people who live there now however.
We've had a Rinnai since 2008. The first one was installed in place of the old tanked heater in the kitchen. When we remodeled the kitchen, we put in an outside unit. They've been great. Always have hot water, as much as we need, and even during the low 20's temps in Houston recently, we still had 120 degree water.
The only way to get 140 degree water is with a boiler. a regular water heater, tanked or tankless, will struggle to get water that hot safely. But, there's no need, since most decent dishwashers will heat the water.
I have a new custom home, and it was plumbed for tankless water heaters. Let me describe my setup. It is a good sized house. I have 4 Rheem tankless water heaters: two for the east side of the house, and two for the west side.
On the East side, the two tankless water heaters are wired together so the "A" unit fires for 10 times, then the "B" unit fires for 10 times, and so on. If there is sufficient demand, both A and B fire up.
The West side is the same.
There are recirculation pumps on both the east & west, with a thermostat that measures the water temperature. If the water temperature drops below 85 degrees, the thermostat triggers the recirculation pump to circulate hot water, which in turn causes the tankless water heater to fire -- once the temperature of the water in the line gets back above 85 (or whatever), the water heater ceases to fire; the recirculation pump continues for a few minutes to cool the water heater.
I can program the units to hit a very high temperature -- I've forgotten exactly how high, but I can program it to well over 140 degrees. I think I have it set to 125.
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