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Water Shorts

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Water Shorts

Electric Tankless Water Heaters: Do They Help The Environment Or Are There Better Alternatives?

On demand electric heaters will cut your utility costs in the short term but are more harmful to the environment, and are not as good for the efforts of the utilities managing the supply of power. For this reason these water heaters are losing ground in countries such as Japan where until recently they were very popular.

The main reason on-demand water heaters save money is that in a tank water heater, you produce heat throughout the day for use later, and some of that heat flows from the tank to the surrounding living space (or wherever your hot water heater is located).

You can alleviate this to some extent by properly insulating your hot water tank (special insulating blankets are available for this purpose - buy the thickest kind available), putting pipe insulation on your hot water plumbing, and by turning down the thermostat on the heater from the factory default of 140F to 120F, which is both more efficient and safer. But you will still probably discover that an on-demand heater costs less to run, at least right now, because there is so little energy lost to heat escaping from the device, since there's no heat storage reservoir.

The reason I say electric tankless water heaters are not as good for the environment is that they create unpredictable spikes in electrical demand, which makes it harder for electrical utilities to manage the power demand. An on demand electric heater draws a huge current while it is heating water. A tank heater, on the other hand, draws a lesser amount of current for a longer time, and stores that energy as heat. Imagine if in a city of a million people, everyone had an on demand electric heater, and everyone showered when they started their day. The electricity company would need to find a way to quickly ramp up electricity generation in time for the tankless electric water heaters to fire up and provide hot water for showers, then to rapidly drop electrical generation once the showering time (say, 9:00 am) is pretty much done. Since the utility can't ramp up this fast with fuels like coal or nuclear, they wind up ramping up much earlier (say, 4 in the morning), and then ramp down much later (say, 11 in the morning), so that while you have saved energy, you have caused the utility to produce a significant amount of energy that isn't actually needed, and may be wasted.

For this reason, in Japan for example, there is an aggressive push underway to convince people to move away from tankless electric water heaters, and instead use an electric tank heater with some intelligence built into it so that the tank heats water hotter when there is excess electricity on the grid, and then blends that water with colder water if necessary, to provide hot water at a steady temperature.

Then there's the issue of time-of-use pricing. In some states and provinces you are charged for electricity based on the time of day it is used, and in some areas you may even pay based on the peak amperage you use. So if you shower at 8:30 in the morning you are showering during 'prime time' for electricity prices, and that means an electric tankless water heater will consume a lot of the expensive power, while a tank water heater, if it has the intelligence designed into it to predict that no hot water is required while you're away at work, can give you hot water heated overnight, then not draw more electricity to heat the tank until the next evening, when time-of-use prices have gone down.

Another point to think about is the lifestyle changes you will need to make when you go to an on-demand electric heater. The house I live in now has an electric tankless water heater, and I have to say it does not perform as well as I would like. The flow of water is much slower than you might get from a tank heater (because the tankless heater only lets through as much heated water as it can heat at that time), and for a job like washing pots and pans, where you may like to turn the tap on, then off, then back on, then back off, it just doesn't provide hot water like a tank heater does, because you experience a lag between when the water starts running and when the tankless heater starts heating. So your pipe is like a sediment core of cold and hot layers moving up to the tap.

All in all, while on demand electric heaters are getting a lot of coverage at present, and may become more common in North America in the short term, I predict that their popularity will be short-lived, because of all the drawbacks described above, both to homeowners and utilities struggling to manage peak demand. If you're considering buying an on demand electric heater, expect to see financial savings replaced with higher utility bills in the long term, as electricity companies put more pressure on users to reduce their peak demand, and don't be surprised if the performance of your heater isn't what you thought it would be, in terms of how well it heats your water or its ability to handle intermittent hot water needs.

About the Author

Robin Green runs Green-Energy-Efficient-Homes.com, a website that helps people save energy in their homes. For more on energy efficient electric tankless heaters, see Electric tankless water heaters on Green Energy Efficient Homes.