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"stephen wadlow" writes:

On Tue, October 19, 2010 09:05, wrote:

I had "tankless" in Ireland, and frankly, it *sucked*.

I had "tankless" in England for a week, and it was worse than sucked, it
was unusable. As in "don't bother. Take your shower cold- spritz
water, minimal soap, spritz cold water again".

Interesting. I think my takeaway here is: "don't stay at hotels that
Crash recommends."

No, I would not recommend any of those hotels except to people
I never wanted to hear from again. Perhaps because they were
murdered in their beds, or something equally gruesome.

Ok, so you're taking the datapoint of tankless heaters at a hotel that you
wouldn't recommend to other people as being a representative sample of all
tankless heaters everywhere? Really??

- - - -

I'm increasingly beginning to suspect that this is your reality, and not
the reality of the population at large.

Well, it was shared with Geo and Jeff, at least one of whom you know.
Check with them.

If they stayed in the same hotel as you, and had similar experiences, then
that's hardly new data.
It's a re-hash of existing data.

Well, you were wondering if I was hallucinating (the "your reality"
phrase). Confirmation by Geo and Jeff would at least prove/disprove
that.


Could it be that you didn't know how to use it, and weren't willing to ask?
That's what an awful lot of what your saying seems to indicate.

I did read the instructions... that's how I knew what the
knobs did. And yes, it was a "point of delivery" system in
all such cases; they were mounted on the wall next to the
bathtub/shower (in one case, *in* the shower! Yes, fire,
water, and 220VAC all in your shower with you! ).

Gawd, what were they _thinking_???

I'll note that this is nothing like any of the tankless units I've seen in
the last 10 years. In fact, my Bosch only goes to 130 or 140F and no
higher. I've not seen a unit that has the "Knob A" that you describe,
though my understanding of the product lines tells me that some of the
small, "Point of Use" units out there have that capability. All of
those that I've seen have been electric-only. I'm not convinced those
are the sort of units you encountered either though.

Yep. The Knob A system was that way.

The best of the worst was really probably the Irish one- it had _no_
knobs at all, so at least there was no temptation to try to make it
work any better than it wanted to work, which was merely "horrid"
rather than "judicially actionable".

have been minor, and easily dealt with as an in-home repair. I get
unlimited hot water, have more space in my basement, and don't have to
worry about my water tank dying catastrophically at an inopportune
time.

Wait a bit then.

All heat exchangers are going to fail eventually; all that matters is
that it doesn't fail while you own the house. :-) Note that design
for long term durability is inverse to design for efficiency; for
durability you want thick metal and for efficiency you want thin
metal (especially for stainless steel, which has _crappy_ heat
transfer characteristics; considerably worse than cast iron).

Although, I have to admit that Rinnai using a copper heat exchanger
is a very nice idea. It's probably as durable as cast iron, with
better heat transfer characteristics. I might want to look into
those given that Jim reports that it does fire down to a trickle
without overheating... and can do 199,000 BTUs continuous.

- Crash

My overall gas usage is less, and the bills are smaller. This is a
common story amongst many people I know (and several of whom you know)
with similar units.

It's not what your gas bill is- it's your total cost of ownership
(assuming you've reached the "I am satisfied with the hot water"
criterion is reached.

Say I could cut your gas bill by 90%... but the device to do it
cost $20,000. Would it be worth it? Probably not.

That's my point. The monthly bill from Nstar is only one part
of the equation. Upfront cost divided by device lifetime is
often a larger factor.

(Calculating the actual payback time for a Prius versus a
plain old Camry is also quite instructive in the TCOA domain)

- Crash