Clearly, a number of people who have bought tankless water heaters at a Popular Hardware store, and have never had them before and do not know how to use them. This is a fantastic heater. It can run four things simultaneously in our home with a constant temperature and at a huge saving on our power bill, to the tune of $75 per month in savings! How do we do it? Well, first you need to know the best way to install these for whole house water heating. If your old water heater is still good then leave it right where it sits. You can't use the electric running to your old heater anyways unless it is on a 40 amp circuit and is 8 Gauge wire and it most likely is neither, so just leave your old tank in place and turn off the fuse. This will give the very cold outside water from the well or the city feed the chance to warm to the ambient room temperature. If the tankless heater turns out not to be enough for your crew you can turn the old heater back on but set the thermostat to 70 or 80 degrees to pre-warm the water and it will cost almost nothing to run your old heater at this low setting. The old heater also makes a great back up. If your tankless needs a new element or is out of commission for any other reason you can flip it back on. A lot of people complain about surges in the water temperature with tankless heaters and this is super easy to solve. I use a 2.5 -gallon water tank that I purchased new at another mass retailer for under $30 but if you can afford it a better solution is one of the small Eemax 110 volt tanked water heaters they sell at Lowes. Place this tank after your Eemax tankless heater. If the tankless heater should cycle off and on the water, all goes into this after tank before traveling on to your faucet or shower. Because it gets blended there is no more up and down to the water temperature even when the unit cycles. Many of my plumbing colleagues have the second tanked Eemax heater and that works even better. You set that heater to about 100 to 105 degrees and it hardly uses any electricity at all because when the water is turned on the water coming out of the main tankless unit is equal to or higher in temperature than the setting in the 110 unit so the element doesn't even run. When you turn off your water the water in the tanked unit is hot and so again the element doesn't need to do a thing. This second unit makes a wonderful blending tank that is preheated. My less expensive, non-heated tank, works just as well once you have gone through a couple of gallons of water and it begins to mix in the hot water from the tankless. You do waste 1 to 1.5 gallons of water though. With a second very small Eemax heater, even a 1-gallon unit, you get hot water right away, no spikes and valleys and virtually no chance in your electric bill. So save your old tank, connect that to this unit, connect this unit to a tiny 110 Eemax unit, and send to your shower or faucet. My system has run for almost 20 years that way with my first Eemax unit with no troubles except 2 element replacements. Now with this purchase, I have two setups like this and expect this setup with the new EEM24018 will run for as long or longer problem free. Don't forget to isolate each unit with ball valves! Great company too, if you have any problems call their support, they will help you with anything you need.
