Hey guys, I am Roger Wakefield, LEED AP, The Expert Plumber.
Talking to you this morning about are tankless water heaters big enough for a large family?
And the answer is yes they are!
A tankless water heater can handle a large family and multiple showers, multiple hot
water outlets open at the same time if you do things right.
The things to do right are preferably have in a low flow shower head.
A low flow shower head helps limit the amount of water coming through it at one time, and
if you can limit that amount of water it's really easy to take multiple shower at one
time.
A shower head - to figure the hot water usage, a shower head, if you have a two gallon per
minute shower head you're going to get 75% hot water through that when you're in the
shower, and that's pretty close but it's a good average to go by.
So if you're trying to figure out how big of a flow rate you need on your tankless water
heater, you need to figure out how many showers you can have running at one time.
But also take into consideration if the dishwasher kicks on, if somebody washes a load of clothes,
anything at all like that that can use hot water is going to affect this.
So what you want to think about is how many gallons per minute can go through this tankless
water heater?
And there's a lot of things to take into consideration and a lot of plumbers will just tell you "oh
yeah, you know, any tankless water heater will work."
The thing to remember is gallons per minute.
You need to look at the flow rate of a tankless water heater to see how many gallons a minute
will flow through it.
I went to install a tankless water heater for a lady one day, she was rebuilding her
shower, she had four body sprays, two rain shower heads, and two regular shower heads.
We were looking at about 12 gallons a minute on all these heads.
Ok?
The problem is the tankless water heater that she had picked only had a flow rate of 4.8
gallons a minute at a 70 degree delta.
And what your delta is where I'm from the water temperature coming into the house is
normally 70 degrees.
She had wanted it set at 140.
So when you're trying to heat water 70 degrees you're creating a 70 degree delta, and at
70 degree delta that 4.8 slowed down a little bit.
So, what we ended up having to do is install dual tankless water heaters and pipe them
to where they weren't running parallel, ok?
They were literally side by side you came, you split it, you went through them, that
way you can get 4.5, 4.8 gallons per minute through each of them.
Why is that important?
Because you're trying to get flow here.
You're not just trying to get an overabundance of hot water, you're trying to get flow.
If you pipe them in series to where the water comes up, splits, and go through both of them,
come back together then goes through, they can each put through 4.8, 5.4, whatever the
gallon amount is.
If you pipe them parallel it can only go through it, as fast as it can go through it.
So, you know, the thing to remember is a tankless water heater is great.
It's going to give you an almost unlimited supply of hot water.
The thing is, it's going to have to throttle it down in order to give you how much you
need.
So, remember, talk to your plumber, let him know what your worst case scenario is.
Worst case scenario is you could have four people in showers, we could be doing laundry
and running a load of dishes.
If you know all these things in the beginning and the plumber knows all these things he
can help you make sure that you get a good tankless water heater that has a good gallon
per minute flow rate.
Make sure he understands the delta or make sure that he lets you understand it.
Guys, tankless water heaters are a great investment.
They're good for you, they're good for your house, for your family.
They're good for the economy because it helps us save money by saving our natural resources.
I hope you're enjoying these videos, if so please click on the subscribe button.
Guys, subscribing to the channel is how YouTube finds us, likes us, and says "hey look, this
guy is putting out good content because people are subscribing."
If you like what we're putting out, please leave us a comment, let us know if there's
things that you want to know, put it down here in the comments.
Let us know what you want us to talk about or what questions you'd like us to answer
for you.
Hope you're enjoying these, if so please tell your friends about them, please share them
with your friends, please let people know.
That's what we're trying to do, let people know what plumbing is all about.
My name is Roger Wakefield with Texas Green Plumbing, saving you money one drop at a time.