Energy-efficient water
heater installation

Tankless or storage tank?

Neither is automatically the right answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling rather than sizing. The decision comes down to how much hot water you draw at once, how the building is fed, and what the existing venting and gas or electrical capacity will support.

Tankless

• Endless hot water — it heats on demand rather than storing
• No standby loss, so it costs nothing to keep hot overnight
• A fraction of the footprint, wall-mounted, often out of the way
• Typically a longer service life than a storage tank
• Needs adequate gas supply and dedicated venting, or a real electrical feed
• Higher up-front cost, recovered over the life of the unit

Traditional storage tank

• Lower up-front cost, and a straight swap on most existing installs
• Handles simultaneous heavy draws well within its capacity
• Simple, familiar, and cheap to service
• Runs out and needs recovery time once the tank is drawn down
• Standby losses, and a footprint you cannot avoid

Sizing it properly

An undersized unit is a daily annoyance and an oversized one is money burnt every hour for its whole life. Sizing means counting the fixtures that can run at once, the flow each one needs, and the incoming water temperature — not matching whatever number was on the old tank, which may well have been wrong when it was fitted.

What a proper installation includes

The unit is the easy part. The install is where the difference shows up two years later:

• A safety pan and a drain line — so the day it eventually fails is a mop, not a claim
• Correct venting — sized, sloped and terminated properly on gas units
• A relief valve and discharge line routed to a legal termination
• Isolation valves on both connections, so the next service does not mean draining the building
• Expansion control where the supply arrangement calls for it
• Seismic and physical strapping where the location requires it
• Correct electrical or gas connection, and disposal of the old unit
• Permitting and inspection where Miami-Dade requires it

We install pans as a matter of course. It is a small line on the invoice, and it is what turns the day the tank eventually fails into a mop rather than a claim.

Point-of-use and recirculation

Not every hot water problem is the heater. A fixture at the far end of a long run wastes water every time someone waits for it to get hot — a point-of-use unit at that fixture or a recirculation arrangement solves it without touching the main heater. Both are things we fit.