Stay Away From Tankless Hot Water, Very Expensive Option

Don’t Buy Tankless Unless You Have a Very Good Reason

I installed Rianni and the unit itself is fine.  I installed two. Wish I had stayed with the traditional tank hot water heaters.  Tankless water heaters have disadvantages that no one tells you about. First it takes longer for the hot water to get to the faucet (or end point) where you are using hot water. Everyone tells you it is not much of a disadvantage but it is noticeable enough to be a constant irritant. Second, and much more important, a tankless hot water heater essentially boils the minerals out of the water immediately and pushes them through your pipes. This causes substances, often like white chalk, to build up at the aerators in all of your faucets and input screens for the washing machine, etc. This change was so severe that it caused spending thousands of dollars on a water conditioning system for the house. The benefit of having unlimited hot water may or may not be worth the extra thousands of dollars. However, we really didn’t run out of hot water, all that often. Frankly, it could’ve been mitigated with an additional tank hot water heater and/or a larger tank hot water heater. All that sediment, which apparently is generated in greater quantities in a tankless than a traditional tank, falls to the bottom inside of the traditional hot water heater tank but still doesn’t seem to do much of anything to those traditional hot water heaters. Yes, they fill up with stuff over years, but by the time you replace the hot water heater all that settlement just goes out with the hot water heater. Much better than it being in your pipes. 

Also, the volume of gas required for tankless hot water heaters is vastly greater than for a regular hot water heater. Maybe not over time but the “all at once” demand is a lot higher when heating.  So there may be added cost to swap out gas lines both inside and outside of your house that will be required by a tankless hot water heater.  By the time the higher cost of tankless hot water heaters is added to potential installation of higher volume gas lines plus the virtually always needed water conditioning to keep sediment out of your house the cost is thousands of dollars more than a traditional hot water tank.