good afternoon YouTube so I wanted to make this video to talk about some of the reasons I chose
this particular heater okay so I summarized some of the considerations I used in choosing
this heater and when I first started looking at these I was really overwhelmed by the huge variety
of heaters out there just Takagi alone who I use has 45 different models of tankless water heaters
probably 30 or 40 different manufacturers that each have 30 or 40 different kinds of heaters and
just seeing all of those really was overwhelming so what I found most useful was to split these
heaters up into various categories here so that you can narrow in on what you're looking for so
the very first category would be what sort of fuel the heater uses so you have electric and
gas heaters propane or natural gas the electric heaters are generally going to be less expensive
and the gas heaters are going to be more expensive because you have burners and fans and blowers and
igniters and venting and all that stuff to deal with the operating costs are going to depend on
your fuel cost and availability in my case natural gas comes out to be the least expensive it's about
a quarter of the price of an electric heater and I don't have anywhere near the electric service
to the house to even consider an electric heater so the next main category is location so if you're
looking at location you can have your heater outdoors or indoors so they make two different
kinds of heaters the outdoor heaters require no venting that they'll have a an intake then at
the bottom and they have an exhaust vent at the top of the heater just kicked on I'm running the
dishwasher so that's that's a the amount of noise the heater makes but you may have to worry about
freeze protection if you're in an area that gets cold the heaters will have some degree of freeze
protection an indoor heater is going to require venting and it may also require venting for both
the intake and the exhaust so that the next category on water heaters is going to be the
rating thermal rating either BTUs per hour or maybe kilowatts and you might also see things
like gallons per min it I think this is a u.s. specific thing but you'll find a lot of heaters
most of the heaters are up in this 190 thousand to a hundred and ninety nine thousand BTU per hour
rating that's an interesting number and it turns out that if you go 200 thousand BTUs per hour
or above that's considered a boiler instead of a water heater and about the only difference I could
find is boilers seem to cost twice as much as water heaters and they cost a lot more to install
I found these in stall prices on homeadvisor.com so there's like I say a bunch of heaters up in
this range they're going to cost something like twelve hundred dollars give or take and an average
install cost of say seven hundred to thirteen hundred dollars and then you'll find heaters
in the 181 60 140 but once you get down to 120 thousand which is what my unit is rated at that's
about 37 kilowatts instead of 58 the smaller heater at 120,000 BTU an hour can use half-inch
gap line it will only put out about 6 gallons a minute depending on the temperature you're
dealing with the cost was quite a bit less about $800 in my case I spent about $200 on installation
but these bigger heaters are going to need maybe three quarter inch or one inch gas line so 1920
millimeter up to maybe 25 millimeter gas line and if you need a new gas line installed you're
looking at maybe another $500,000 installation cost for the gas line I find the BTU per hour
heat rating is probably the best way to compare heaters and as I showed in an earlier video you
can take your gallons per minute of flow that you need multiply that by your temperature rise what's
your hot water temperature what's your cold water temperature and that difference is the temperature
rise multiply that by 500 and that will give you your BTUs per hour because I find the a lot of
these manufacturers play games with these numbers here the lower the temperature rise you can raise
the gallons per minute it's probably best to figure out your gallons per minute and your
temperature rise and then figure out how many BTUs per hour you really need and you don't want to get
too small a heater because then you can't keep up with the demand and you're going to get cold
water but if you get too big of a heater there's a couple of things that happen one is you might need
a bigger gas line which costs money and the other thing that's not very well documented is these are
the maximum numbers but each heater is going to have a minimum heat and flow rate number on my
heater it's about ten percent about six tenths of a gallon per minute before the heater turns on and
these bigger heaters you might be looking at one gallon per minute minimum flow before the heater
will turn on so getting too big of a heater you might not have your hot water turn on if
you're used to cracking the hot water valve just a little bit and getting a little trickle of hot
water because that's not going to happen and then the other thing just down here you'll find a bunch
of these RV and camping water heaters they're usually in the 30 to 40,000 BTU an hour rating
they do maybe one or two gallons a minute for like a camp shower going to pay maybe a hundred to two
hundred and fifty dollars those aren't really rated for continuous permanent installation up
in there the heater kicked on again and so that the last two things to look at here are there are
non condensing and condensing heaters it supplies to the gas unit so non-condensing just means they
earn the gas inside the heater and then it goes up the flue they're generally less expensive
pensive and a condensing heater and they're less efficient you're probably looking at mid
80% efficiency the condensing heaters on the other hand are going to be maybe a hundred to
under dollars more expensive than an equivalent non condensing unit but they are more efficient
this one is ninety three and some of them go up to 95 or 96 percent efficiency in the
big way they do that is they are condensing the water vapor that's going up the stack using that
hot exhaust to preheat the cold air coming in and they condense out that water and then you need the
condensate drain that I showed you in the previous video you'll save about 10 percent in gas usage so
if you use a lot of gas it's probably worth the condensing heater but the other thing that again
isn't very well documented is what kind of venting does each heater require so a non condensing
heater needs category three stainless steel venting just think of that as really expensive
pipe if all you need to do is put a ninety degree on the top of the heater and go out through a wall
and on outside wall and bent to the outside just a foot or two away it's not that expensive you
know maybe a hundred bucks for one of those but if you have to go up through a complex series of
piping and a long distance this stuff can cost a lot of money and you buy each piece each straight
section is pre-made each angle each elbow and you buy every piece separately and they're all really
expensive and I'll show you a little bit later I'll talk about the cost the condensing heaters
can use stainless or you can just get by with PVC plumbing pipe and that's what I used on my heater
because the condensing heater cools the exhaust gas down to below the boiling point of water so
you can use plastic pipe so then the final aspect here independent of condensing and non-condensing
is what the vent looks like there's concentric vents in their separate intake and exhaust ports
so concentric vents are like I showed you in the previous video they use an inner pipe and an outer
pipe and the inner pipe is for the intake and the outer pipe is for the exhaust that
pipe I'll show you a cut in a screenshot here of a typical web page with those pipes you're
looking at several dollars per inch of that kind of pipe with separate intake and exhaust pipes
like in my heater you're looking at maybe $1 a foot couple of dollars for each elbow I think I
purchase 10 feet a pipe was about 15 dollars really pay attention to the venting and what
materials you have to use so just to summarize down here consider the entire system cost when
you are looking at a heater like this you got to buy you the heater you've got to get gas to right
or fuel either electric or gas and then you've got to get the exhaust and the intake squared
away so you need to look at all of these factors because you might find a really cheap heater that
requires really expensive venting you know for instance you could get a non condensing heater
save $200 on the heater but then you'll spend $200 on venting and you'll end up with a heater that's
less efficient than if you bought a condensing one and spent $30 on the venting you know what
I did then was use all these categories to narrow down your search until you get down to just a few
heaters and then you can pick brand and color and style and features and things like that so
yeah that's that's the big thing is use these categories to narrow down your search and in my
case I came down to this heater that was the only one I could find that met all my needs not saying
that this is the best heater for everybody but it works for me so I was able to make use of my
existing gas piping and just out a little section I was able to reuse the existing roof penetrations
for the exhaust vent it's all put a copy of this file on my Google Drive page and I'll put a link
in the video description if you have any more questions about tankless heaters I'm by no means
an expert but go ahead and post up in the comment section below and I'll try to answer any questions
there to the best of my ability and yeah if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and I'll
put some of the other install videos over here on the left side and as always thanks for watching
you