my electric 50 gal water heater just sprung a leak in the tank and I must replace.I’ve heard that the gas tankless units work good.what about the electric ones
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Elect. tankless.
I have installed a couple of them.
Unit size is more critical than for gas tankless. Electric service for them means two 240v/30a circuites instead of the one you currently have for the storage tank type heater. As far as energy savings, thats a maybe. They only draw current when the unit senses flow so you don't have any standby losses, but when they are on, they are pulling about 23 amps on each of the two circuites.
Last one I put in was a monster 480v three phase unit. Does a heck of a job and keeps up better than a 240v model.
They aren't cheap. By the time you get one large enough to support a whole house, you could purchase two standard tank type water heaters. Smaller, point of use heaters are more cost efficient and require less in the way of electric service.
thot about throwing together a tankless from scrap parts once.
not even worth the effort
heres some numbers on what Dave said;
50A circuit gives you about 545 BTU per minute, figure 60F water up to 130F OK ??
now ya got 70F rise so you can heat 7.8# of water per minute to shower temperature, that is about 3 liters (I'll mix units to keep the calculations interesting) per minute, less than 1 gallon.
Ya like dribbly showers?