New hot water heater

Our hot water heater decided to die last Friday night. I went to go light the pilot and found a bunch of water leaking on the pilot light.. no way I was going to get another second out of that heater. Since it was the weekend, the local plumber was going to charge me an extra arm for the install so we decided to wait it out until Monday.

On-demand Heater

The nice part about the wait was that it gave me time to research what kind of hot water heater I wanted to purchase. In our old condo, we installed a tankless hot water heater and loved it (Takagi TK-1). The only problem we had with it was in the winter. The water pressure got noticeable lower and we could only run one thing at a time.. showering when you need the sink? lukewarm in both. For Chicago style winters I was looking for something that did 4 gallons per minute (GPM) with a 100°F rise. The inlet water temperature is really cold in the winter like 38°F and an ok shower is like 120°F, hence the 100°F rise. The newest Takagi only gets 3 GPM. Also our original experience was in a condo and the water heater wasn't very far away from the destination. Our house has three floors and 3.5 baths; if I were going to do tankless, I'd install two. Since that wasn't within the price range that I wanted to spend, I started to lookup storage heaters (tank).

Storage Heater

There are numerous articles on hot water heaters but the question really boils down to the first hour rating. I used the following calculation to determine our first hour rating:

I calculated a 60 gallon first hour need. All of the 50 gallon heaters met this benchmark. How was I going to choose then? The next thing is efficiency rating.. the higher the better. I found a really awesome resource which shows all certified efficiency ratings for hot water heaters. The UI is a little clunky but you can get some nice results. After this search, I had narrowed my brand choice to American and A.O. Smith.

Install

Now since I was under the gun to get a new heater put in right away, I didn't have time to purchase one on my own and have it shipped to the house. What this means is that whatever hot water heater the plumbing company had was what we were going to get. So much for the research, I guess. Luckily the man who does all of our home repair had a plumber who exclusively used A.O. Smith tanks.. nice! It took them about 2 hours to install the new tank and the all-in cost was $750. I thought this was a great price, the other estimate I got was from a company that uses Bradford-White units (the one we had to replace in our old condo) and that was going to be $1600!

Conclusion

The tank works as expected. We can fill up our huge claw foot tub and it doesn't run out of water. The only thing I've had to do was adjust the temperature settings on the unit; It was set to the middle setting which was like 140°F! We have small children so 120°F is the maximum our tank will be at for a while, which is the minimum setting on the thermostat. The unit has a 6 year warranty but I'm expecting it to go at least 12 years. We'll see if that holds true .