<p>Anyone made the switch? My water heater is having issues and the repairman suggests we might be happier with tankless, there are several options, 82%, 93%, 98% efficiency. The more efficient, the more expensive.</p>
<p>I am being told tankless will still work with recirculating hot water. Any thoughts or experiences to share?</p>
<p>We made the switch a long time ago and it is the best thing ever. </p>
<p>The main benefit is that you are never out of hot water - great when you have 2 kids and lots of dishes and laundry etc. </p>
<p>Ask about putting in a timer to start the water circulating in the morning.<br>
That that does is start the water going through the heaters and pipes so when you turn on the water it is hot already. </p>
<p>This is useful if you have a schedule where people take showers at usually times. </p>
<p>I don’t know about the efficiency but I would probably do the 93 since I expect the jump to 98 is probably pretty expensive </p>
<p>We’ve been tank-less for 8 or 9 years now. The upside is you never run out of hot water. But you can overwhelm the “flow rate” for hot water. The main impact for us is we found it very tricky to get showers to a “perfect temp”. Its often too hot if only one person is showering, but rapidly gets cool if another user turns on a shower or faucet - then the additional elements (we have a 3 element system that recruits more elements as needed) kick on and it gets too hot. Depending on the size of your home and the number of anticipated simultaneous showers, this may be something to consider. </p>
<p>On the upside, I guess this will be one reason to be happy about the D leaving me with an empty nest!</p>
<p>We considered it since the master bath is at the end of the pipe from the water heater. However, when researching the recirculating aspect it seemed like there could be issues. Living in Florida now where the cold water isn’t that cold (groundwater temp 72 vs 55 up north) I think there was an issue with getting truly cold water.</p>
<p>For us it didn’t seem cost effective. Huge initial expense- same huge initial one with solar as well. In a cold climate you may find benefits.</p>
<p>there have been a couple threads on this topic over the years. Here is one of them:</p>
<p><a href=“Search results for '' - College Confidential Forums”>Search results for '' - College Confidential Forums;
<p>Great thread! The furnace repair person is on his way…to fix the hot water. </p>
<p>We don’t have a hot water heater separate from our furnace. I’m hoping the fix doesn’t cost me a fortune and can be done today. </p>
<p>Symptoms…hotish water in shower turns to cold, then gets hotish again…not really HOT, just hot ish!</p>
<p>Can’t take a hot bath at all…no way to fill the tub with hot water.</p>
<p>When we moved here, we could easily fill even out two person jaccuzi with hot water.</p>
<p>Anyway…I’m betting tankess will come up here too.</p>
<p>We made the switch. Maybe our house just isn’t that big, but the delay for hot water doesn’t seem that long to me. Where I really notice the savings is now that the nest is empty and the hot water is only needed during very specific times, we don’t pay to keep it hot during the day. Also, when we travel, which we are doing more, I don’t have to deal with turning down/off the water heater.</p>
<p>One other thing that may or may not matter for you is that when we went tankless we had it put in the attic. We converted the location where the water heater used to be into a closet. </p>