good morning YouTube so it's been just about a year since I installed the tankless water heater
in the garage and I wanted to give you an update it is working fine no problems with hot water in
the winter didn't notice any real difference in gas consumption and I'll show you that next big
benefit of the tankless heater is I now have room for this really nice utility sink where the old
tank type heater used to be and I have storage underneath plenty of storage under there so the
utility sink has been a really nice addition out here just really handy for rinsing things
off and the other thing I like about it because it's so big you can take this it's like a three
gallon bucket and put it down in there fill it up with water if you want to make up some soapy
water or mix up something like that you know I use that bucket when I descaled the tankless heater I
can mix up water to wash vehicles or wash windows whatever you want to do so that is it's been just
really nice you know I've been wanting that for thirty years and I finally finally had a place
to put it once I got rid of the old tank so let's go take a look at the utility bill so we can take
a look at the gas consumption of this heater versus the old forty gallon tank heater that
used to be there okay so I thought I'd take a look at a year-over-year comparison of my natural gas
bills with the tank heater and the tankless so I collected my utility bills for the period May
through April and with the tank heater that was 2016 and 2017 and with the tankless it was the
same months in 2017 and 2018 the tank heater here used between three and four therms of gas during
the warmer summer months five to six therms in the cooler winter months so there's my gas
bills I don't know what happened on this month that showed for therms and they only build me a
27s I think there must have been a problem in in their billing system that month because here it
was four dollars three dollars and then that one was a dollar 27 but anyway I added up the total
for the whole year with the tank heater 12 months used 54 therms total cost of 56 67 then I put the
tankless in and it basically used a zero or one I used nine therms for the whole year total cost
$33 60 cents and I have that plotted over here on the side the blue is the tank heater and the
orange color is the tankless and in December you can see something changed and what happened was
the gas supplier that I had been using finally implemented their customer charge so that charge
is five dollars a month but it's billed as sixteen point seven cents per day so depending on how
many days are in that billing cycle it'll be a little bit different and in order to get a good
comparison I purposely kept that account active I kept using the same supplier because I wanted to
get 12 months of gas consumption on the tankless heater and be able to compare the bills so what I
did was I separated out the customer charge so it was anywhere from three dollars 34 to $5.34 so out
of the total gas bill for the past year that was $33 60 cents 23:55 of that was service charge or
customer charge so my net cost for gas to compare to this number which didn't have any service
charge was $10 five cents and then the tankless heater of course requires some electric energy
so the cost for electricity I calculated as three dollars 46 cents so the total cost of operating
the tankless heater was $13 51 which is a savings of $43 16 that's pretty much in line with the $40
I had estimated last year when I was figuring out the cost so the tankless heater itself cost about
$200 more than replacing the old tank with a new tank heater and then I spent about $200 on valves
and plumbing and various parts to get the tankless installed so my added cost of the tankless unit
was about four hundred dollars and if I'm saving forty to forty five dollars a year that'll pay
back in maybe nine or ten years and if gas rates continue to go up the payback will be quicker and
in terms of just gas savings that's over an eighty three percent reduction in my natural gas use nine
therms went to heating water and zero almost zero went to heating up the garage with the tank type
heater 45 of those therms were used to heat the air in the garage in December the third-party
gas supplier that I had been purchasing gas from for the last ten years or so finally rolled this
customer charge on to existing customers they didn't actually send out any notice on that I
just all of a sudden bills that were $1.00 we're now five dollars so I decided in May that I would
look at going back to my utility in purchasing gas just directly from them so let's take a look
at the numbers that I worked out to see if that made sense okay so I went to the utility which
is Pacific Gas & Electric and if you search around on their website you can find what they call their
gas tariff rate so essentially this has all their residential rate calculation information here for
mobile homes and multi-family apartment buildings and all the various options here so this is what
the res intial rates are calculated from I won't go into all the details but they do have this per
day transportation or delivery charge so there's basically a 10 cent a day or three dollars a month
minimum transportation charge as they call it here so PG&E has two basic rates there's the basic non
care rate which is the full retail price and then they have this care program which I'll talk about
a little later that's about a 20 percent discount so anyway they have this minimum charge you're
paying 37 cents per therm for the gas and then you're paying this transportation or delivery
charge about 92 cents for baseline and a dollar 47 for excess that adds up to a total of $1 29
for baseline gas dollar 84 for over baseline or excess here's the care discount so you get about
26 cents off for the care program which gives you a dollar three or a dollar 47 and then there's
this additional charge I think that gets added this public purpose program surcharge whatever
that is and they have all these footnotes here and this is really complicated so I tried to break it
down into what I think your bill would be so let's take a look at that okay so I took that previous
spreadsheet data and I tried to put it into a single page here with some calculated gas bills
based on different number of therms that you used anyway what I did was I clicked the center point
charge over here so they have a five-dollar customer fee they charge 42 cents for the gas
they have a negotiated delivery charge price with the utility so I pay 79 cents for delivery which
cults in a dollar 21 per therm for gas that I use plus the $5 customer fee now PG&E has this $2 96
cent delivery charge for retail customers I don't believe that applies to care customers then the
gas is 30 or 37 cents which is actually less than what Centrepointe charges but the delivery charge
is higher and so your net cost dollar 10 on care and a dollar 38 on the retail and then I looked
at what kind of consumption would you need to make up this five-dollar customer fee with care you'll
never break even you're always paying more if you're paying full retail on the residential rate
if you exceed 30 therms you've made up that $5 so if your average not your average bill but every
single bill is at least 30 therms it might make sense to use one of these third-party suppliers
like Centrepointe but if you're using less than 30 it may not make sense now the one thing I did
not figure out was the baseline and excess charges in the summer the baseline allowances 18 therms in
the winter you get 60 therms I think Centrepointe just charges a flat rate they don't have a higher
rate for gas but I don't know what the delivery charge because PG&E charges more for delivery
if you go above the baseline so I don't know if this number also changes I've never been there so
I don't know anyway Kerr California alternate rates for energy like I said it's about a 20%
discount and I think that also waives this minimum delivery charge so I worked out some example bills
in therms which is what the utility bills 1/3 is a hundred thousand BTU or British thermal units it's
also equal to twenty nine point three kilowatt hours and if you look up the price you're looking
at between three and four cents per kilowatt hour that you're paying for gas compared to
maybe twelve cents for electricity big difference you know a quarter to a third the price for gas
compared to electric but anyway what I did was worked out some hypothetical bills assuming zero
to twenty therms per month this is the center point bill this would be PG&E with the care
program PG&E with the retail program these numbers are probably close but I wouldn't bet money on
them being exactly right this is just based on my understanding of that previous spreadsheet and
then what I did was plotted them here on the side here's the care program it's just a straight line
here's the center point bill also a straight line but it starts at five dollars and then here's the
PG&E retail rates and you can see up at twenty it's starting to close in and if you get up here
to about thirty therms these two lines are gonna cross so if you're using more than thirty might
make sense to go with somebody like Centrepointe but I've decided it doesn't make sense because
I'm down here in May I went ahead and I had my twelve months of data so I sent in my paperwork
and I got my June bill from the gas company and it was indeed LA so that's a good thing so yeah
if you have any questions about this data post up in the comment section below and I'll put some of
the other tankless water heater videos over here on the left side and as always thanks for watching