Who doesn’t like a hot shower after a long, excruciating day? Hot jacuzzi or tub relaxes the muscles. Laying back as the warmth rushes through your body, cleansing it, soothing it. It’s one of the most important needs of the 21st century, to have a hot water source in the house without which one cannot imagine living. While many use tank water heaters, a more efficient heating of water is done without a tank and is known as a tankless water heating system.
What is a tankless water heater?
As the name suggests, it is a water heater which does not use a tank. The idea is to heat the water when it reaches you. That means it does not store water to heat it. There’s no limit on how much water you can use at once. The best tankless water heaters provide heated water on demand. But instead of storing the water in a tank throughout the day, this system makes the water go through some electric coils or gas powered burners that heat the water before it reaches your tap or shower or dishwasher.
How does it work?
To understand how a tankless water heating system works, we must know how a traditi
onal system operates. Here, there’s a large tank (available in several sizes) which continuously heats the water in the tank to keep close to a particularly high temperature. Standby heat loss is the term given to the loss of energy in keeping the water at that temperature even when the water is not in use.
The tankless system employs a new method of using a fast heat exchanger, which heats up the incoming water at a tremendous rate when you open up the tap. The water is not heated when it is still, and only gets heated up when it’s in the flow. Thus there is no standby heat loss in this case. However, there is another inconvenience in this case.
When you open a tap or a shower to use hot water, it takes some time before the hot water reaches you, as remaining water from the last usage, which is already cold, stays in the pipes. This happens more commonly in a large tankless heater, which is employed for the entire house. Smaller tankless heaters have less lag time.
This modern utility is powered by various sources depending on your choice while electric, propane, and gas are most commonly used. The electric tankless system is used for smaller units and can fit in a closet-like space. It’s far less expensive than the other two, which are mostly used in heating up the entire house. While it is much more eco-friendly than the traditional system, it needs a lot of renovation for installation; thus the cost is high. Some people even prefer two electric tankless heaters instead of propane or gas powered heater.
It is obvious that the tankless systems cost more the tank water heaters, up to almost thrice the price of a traditional water heater, but they prove to be much cheaper to use over a long time because energy isn’t needed to maintain a large amount of hot water for an entire day. However, it all depends on the usage and needs of the consumer. If you want to save some bucks on the electricity bills and are ready to sacrifice some hefty money in installation, this will be a better choice for you.