good morning YouTube have been trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the condensate
drain on my tankless water heaters so here's a few options that I found on Amazon here this
is a Rheem hose kit here if we scroll up you can see it's it's a replacement condensate drain and
it's basically just a length of clear tubing I'm down here we can see here's the tubing and then I
guess this is designed to go off of one of these vertical concentric vents as they call it so you
can see here this is a double wall tube there's a inner tube here that is for the fresh air coming
in and then on the outside is where the exhaust gas goes up and then here on the side is a little
fitting where you collect the water vapor that condenses out of the exhaust gas and then you
run it through that tube and down to some sort of drain to get rid of it and a lot of these tankless
water heaters this is a Rinnai are set up for these concentric vents they just have a single
exhaust and intake port on the time you set one of these vertical sections on top or they also
make ones with a right angle and a horizontal tube to go off of there that's how a lot of these drain
kits are set up and just to show you here this is a slightly different concentric vent this one
would be for a heater similar to mine it's set up for three inch PVC got the intake over here
and then the exhaust comes in here at a 45 degree angle on the side and then you would add another
45 and then come down here to the exhaust port here and then the separate intake port okay and
one question that might need to be answered is right here this is on Google Answers says
how many pounds of water is relief when burning a hundred thousand BTUs of natural gas or one therm
basically anyway this fellow back about 14 years ago he went through a bunch of calculations down
here and we'll skip down here he actually had a math error in the initial answer there but
if we come down here basically it comes out to about eight pounds of water for one therm or a
hundred thousand BTUs or a hundred cubic feet of natural gas so you're looking at roughly a
gallon of water if you were to condense every single molecule of water out of the exhaust
gas of course exhaust gas going up the stack is probably still at or above the temperature
of your hot water there's probably still quite a bit of humidity and water going up the stack
so you're not going to see that full gallon of water in terms of condensation but you'll see
you know a fair bit of it and then it's also going to depend on how much humidity was in the incoming
air and the temperature and all that but roughly a gallon or four liters of water from a hundred
thousand BTUs and on my heater that's about the maximum burn rate is about a hundred thousand BTUs
per hour so I would see at the most one gallon of water condensing out of the exhaust in an hour of
operation and just to put that in perspective so far my heater has been averaging about one
therm of gas in a month so we're talking about one gallon of water flowing through the drain over a
period of a month it's not one gallon all at once so it's it's not a huge volume of water but it's
not insignificant either so we can go take a look at that okay YouTube so this is what I'm looking
at on my takagi water heater right here where I'm pointing to is the condensate drain port so
this heater collects the condensate inside of the heater itself and there's a threaded pipe fitting
there and this is my washing machine drain pipe is basically a stand pipe that goes down to a
p-trap down at floor level so there's about three feet of vertical pipe here that's open and this is
the washing machine drain right there and there's just enough room in that inch and a half ABS drain
pipe to slip in a 3/8 inch clear PVC drain tube and I think that's about all I need I just have
that pipe but it's just a little length of pipe I just haven't shoved in there there's like a
little groove in the side of the washing machine drain that I slipped the clear PVC in I just had
to come up with a way to go from the male thread on the bottom of the water heater to a hose barb
fitting anyway I thought as a first test just to see if this works this was a compression nut
from a shutoff valve for a faucet so it's got the half-inch pipe thread inside and was made
out of brass and I had a host barb fitting this and I found they made a perfect fit there so I
just wire brushed the brass and put a little flux and got my propane torch and soldered the
two together and I figure I would just use this as a proof of concept to see if this works and
I'll show you later in the video this seems to be adequate for just moving the condensate from right
there to right there I mean this is PVC clear vinyl tubing and that's what the manufacturer
recommends they have PVC or I think they have another kind of drain material first I figured
I'd do this because I have these parts around the only slight concern is that the condensate
is slightly acidic they say it's about equivalent of lemon juice so there might be some problem with
the brass being attacked by the condensate so I figure I'll keep an eye on this I've been using
this for two and a half months and it still looks pretty much like I put it up there so
I figure I'll keep an eye on this maybe check it once a year and see if anything's going on
if that material proves to be a problem so I've got a plastic hose barb fitting here I'll have
to buy a couple of adapters to get this up to the pipe thread that fits on the bottom of the heater
so if it proves to be a problem I'll switch to plastic but anyway let's put this back together
and then I'll show you how this works in action where you can see the condensate drain working
really good a few drops every every second or two and right
now if you are running that better camera there 2.7 gallons a minute
the incoming is 75 and I think 120 on the outlet at 120 this is the clothes
washer running yeah we're getting pretty good get slowed and condensate
that's why it put the clear tube on there so I can keep an eye on it if you see the water
backing up that would say that something is clogged up in the drain pipe there yeah that
comes out pretty pretty steady it's not quite a steady stream and still comes out as drop but
that tube is more than able to pass that amount of water couple drops a second air at the most
yeah I think that's working out okay that's oh there the can see it shuts off instantly
as soon as the clothes washer flow stops that either goes into standby mode and then the
condensate drain stops flowing because helpers no more gas being burned no it's just barely
warm to the touch there doesn't is not hot I mean the hot water is hot but the condensate
drain is just just about skin temperature there so I still need to redo the drain a little bit
because I got a plum in drain pipe for my sink over here so that still needs to be done so X
I'll be moving the drain pipe over just a little bit I've moved the pressure relief
drain here the TTR drain over and then I'll be moving the laundry drain over just a little bit
just to get it closer to the sink on the other side there but yeah that's working out pretty
good so I'll show you the rest of its when I get the laundry done here so it's not so noisy