Is an Electric Tankless Water Heater a Fit for Your Home?

We refuse to install electric tankless water heaters here in Oklahoma at Yarborough & Sons because we have so like we'll install gas tankless all day long because you're not dealing with the same kind of a chemistry set. So on electric tankless you have the heating element wrapped around the waterline and that heating element is powered by electricity. So we've created an electric magnet uh right there in your tankless water heater if it's electric. And so the lifespan of those because of how hard water interacts with an electric tankless, it can really shorten the lifespan and you know a tankless isn't cheap. That's a five or six thousand dollar ordeal and so now we've seen those fail as early as two years. When it comes to where your money's best spent as a homeowner, I I tend to steer people away from an electric tankless and if they want something that's more energy efficient, go towards a heat pump. It's an electric tank style water heater but it's going to be way more energy efficient than a traditional electric tank style water heater.

All right, guys, here's the scenario. Somebody pitched you an electric tankless water heater and promised endless hot water. Do me a favor, go stand at your breaker panel and count the empty slots. There probably aren't too many available. So a whole house electric unit is a huge electrical load, and a lot of homes around here just don't have the room. Running all the wire, getting a breaker panel big enough to accommodate the thing is a substantial electrician bill before you ever own a water heater. Then there's the stacking problem. Run a shower while the dishwasher's going, and the hot water thins right out. I'm Will Yarbrough with Yarbrough & Sons. We do not install electric tankless any size. We put in tanks. Common 40 to 50-gallon tank runs you about $2,308 to $2,349. So has someone pitched you one of these before? If so, leave us a comment down below. Hope you guys have a fantastic day.

Whenever we look at how many gallons per minute that we can produce with an electric tankless water heater, sure, it can service a house. Sure, it can make you comfortable and it can be an efficient appliance under the right circumstances. But the problem is if it's more than just you or just you and your wife or your husband, whoever, well, then comes the problem of it's not going to be enough to service the home's demands and the home's needs all at one time. And frankly, if I can't believe in something to take care of you when you need it most, I'm not going to install it. We're not going to install it because you're not going to call the manufacturer of the water heater whenever it doesn't work the way you want it to. You're going to call us. You're going to call Yarbrough & Sons. You're going to be asking me, "Tucker, why did you sell me this thing whenever it doesn't even allow me to take a shower at full pressure and run my dishwasher at the same time?" Because guess what? Life doesn't stop for anybody. You get home from work, you want to take a hot shower, and you need to run the dishes and or the washer at the same time. And you shouldn't be inhibited to do that by your water heater.

We are leaving money on the table. We are actively rejecting this job and it's nothing to do with the customer and everything to do with the job itself. This is why we refuse to install electric tankless water heaters and I've got the math to show why. There's a lot of marketing out there that talks about tankless and how tankless is the greatest thing since sliced bread. As somebody who has a tankless, I agree. However, I only agree if it's a gas tankless. We refuse at Yarborough & Sons unless very specific criteria are met to install electric tankless water heaters and the reason is we have kind of two main reasons. One is about your comfort, your ability to use your appliance and get the most comfort out of your electric tankless water heater. The second is about your wallet and frankly how it's not worth the money pending the breakdown costs and how fast we've seen these things fail.

Why you shouldn't buy a tankless water heater. If you have a lot of people in your home and those people are trying to take a shower all at once, you know, you've got, you know, upstairs shower or another guest bathroom shower or something like that and you're all trying to run fixtures at the same time calling for hot water and put a lot of strain on that system, you shouldn't buy a tankless because if that is going to be a regular occurrence, we're going to have very diminished water pressure. you know, that pipe is only so big that's pushing out the water out of the tankless. And as it's trying to heat, it's not going to just heat more water. What it's going to do is it will actually restrict flow, make sure that we're heating the water to the desired set point. So, you're going to have a lot less water pressure than what you maybe want. So, if this is you and you've got a lot of people trying to use water fixtures all at once, calling for hot water, you shouldn't buy a tankless water heater.

Our target in pretty much every house is going to be about 110° to 120°. During the summer time when, you know, most of us drink from surface level reservoirs, some of us use water from aquifers in the ground, that water is pretty constantly 60° to 70°. But, if you are like us on city water and you are having to deal with surface water temperature in the fall, winter, and spring, that surface water temperature can be 40° or 50°. Well, now we have a target temp of 120°. So, we need 70° rise in total temperature. That gets us 1.8 to 2.5 gallons of water per minute. That is not enough to run multiple appliances at once. So, we can have a shower head going, or we can have a dishwasher going, or the washer going. We can't have all three at once. So, what happens is whenever you have shower one going, and let's say we also try to run the dishwasher. Well, now we've added our required gallons per minute. Basically, we've cut our available in half, either way you slice it. So, now that shower is going to start trickling. It's just going to That is the experience that you will have with an electric tankless water heater fall, spring, and winter in Oklahoma due to the surface water temperature.

So, what do we do instead, Tucker? This is a pretty doom and gloom video, and I have an electric only house. Great. I have an answer for you. Heat pump water heaters. Look them up. They're incredible. Also, like they're dumb efficient. They're like stupid efficient. And they can run more than one appliance at a single time. Because the reason that you look at tankless, the reason that you look at more efficient water heaters is to save money, correct? Absolutely. But the reality is an electric tankless water heater is not worth your money. It's not worth your heartache or your headache. Go with a heat pump water heater. It will be way more cost effective, way more efficient. It's price point is actually typically less than that of an electric tankless water heater. Its warranties are infinitely better because the tank manufacturers know that scale build-up happens, so they help warranty a lot of this stuff as well.

We would install an electric tankless water heater under these very specific circumstances. It's kind of a three-gate test. Three things, which is, one, that your house genuinely runs on one to one and a half fixtures at a time on average, that you're not, like, trying to run a dishwasher, and a shower, and a washing machine all at the same time. Like, if you're doing those three things, an electric tankless water heater is not going to be for you. Two, that you have a full water treatment solution in place or are going to be adopting a full water treatment solution at the time of installing your electric tankless water heater. And three, you don't live north of, like, Oklahoma or, like, Tennessee. Like, if you live in the South, you could get away with it. If you pass the three-gate test, well, then, maybe then, we could sit down and have a conversation of installing an electric tankless water heater in your house

So most residential houses in suburban areas, like in the OKC metro area, most houses have like 150 to like 200 amp service on their home, meaning the electrical service. And whenever we look at a water heater that is capable of servicing a house of that size, a 27 kilowatt electric tankless water heater is going to pull about 112 amps at the time that it's being used. So like for the entire duration of a shower or the entire duration of a run, whenever it is pushing its two and a half-ish gallons of minute of water out, it is gonna be pulling 100 to 112 amps at any given time. So like that could be using half of your home's potential meter base service, which is gonna be potentially using 40 or 50% of your home's total electric service. So like an electrician would have to get involved if we're looking at like what all is actually available as far as your meter base is concerned, to make sure that you have enough electrical on property to service the electric tankless water heater

why we refuse to install electric tankless water heaters. I don't care how much you offer to pay me. We're not doing it. Uh matter of fact, I don't think they should be manufactured. I think it's uh almost malpractice on the manufacturers's part that they even make them. Uh everywhere in the United States, I don't care where you're at, especially in Oklahoma though, we have hard water. Hard water eats those electric elements like nobody's business. And so whenever it comes to electric tankless water heaters, we're out. We're not going to touch them. You'll have to find a different plumber cuz it's not going to be us who does it because we don't want to be on the hook for the warranty.

The fastest way to know that this isn't for you, that an electric tankless isn't for you. Let's say you're on well water and you don't have a water treatment solution in place. I would run far and run fast from an electric tankless water heater. If you have a house where there's multiple fixtures being used at the same time, meaning you have probably four or five people living in the house at a time, that was where I would say probably not get an electric tankless water heater. And then the next one is, again, your amperage, your service, the electrical service to your home. If you don't have enough to service having an electric tankless on your house, that's where I would say probably steer far, steer fast. If it's gonna eat up 40 or 50% of your total home's amperage availability, probably don't use one

Here is the reason why I absolutely despise the manufacturers of electric tankless water heaters. And frankly, I think it's a disservice to homeowners and to plumbers alike because they don't address this one thing, scale buildup. And here is the problem. Is scale buildup happens no matter what type of tank you have. If you have a tank, a tankless, gas, electric, you have scale, you have sediment, you have calcium. All of it is suspended in your water. And if you're on city water, you have hard water as well. The only way, like I said, there's those caveats of like we'll install it under very specific circumstances. And that's if you have a full-blown water treatment solution in place. So now we're talking like a $15,000 water heater plus water treatment. And at that point, we have other things that we could do to keep your water more comfortable. But the problem comes with the heating surface in a electric tankless. The heating element has to be so short so small. If there's hardness in that water, meaning like the calcium and the magnesium and all of that, whenever we heat it up, well, that actually acts like a little bit of a magnet, for lack of a better word. And what it does is it brings more of that to the surface.

The place where I'm like, I would install this in a house regardless, is a point of use electric tankless water heater. Meaning like we are just using it for this sink or this shower. There's nothing else that this thing is going to be trying to satisfy other than this one faucet or fixture. If it is a point of use system, meaning we're not gonna have multiple things demanding water from it, increasing the gallon per minute demand of that water heater, well then at that point I'm gonna give the green light. If that's what you wanna do, I would say, here we go. Let's get it done. We can make it happen. Because ultimately the demand on it is never going to be so exceedingly great that it can't keep up on gallons per minute. So a point of use water heater is kind of the exception to this rule, meaning we would do it at that point

Electric tankless water heaters, for the love of God, don't do that. Don't don't put those in your home. They are going to fail, especially if you live in a state with hard water like Oklahoma. If all you have is electric available, fantastic. Let's put a heat pump in. We can get a really efficient water heater. Whenever we have an electric heating element mixing with an on-demand system, we are creating electromagnetic field that is going to cause that inlet water line to cake up with so much hard water, you wouldn't believe. It's an incredible science experiment. If you want to run that for five or six grand, you can, you know, throw money that direction. Or, we can go back and put in either just a fully electric water heater or a heat pump water heater in place, and it will last you so much longer, cause you so much less heartache. Tankless electric water heaters are not worth their money. Use instead a either heat pump water heater or a total electric water heater. Now, if you have gas, that's a whole different conversation. Happily talk about gas tankless water heaters. Your >> [singing] >> host. >> [music]

We are leaving money on the table. We are actively rejecting this job and it's nothing to do with the customer and everything to do with the job itself. This is why we refuse to install electric tankless water heaters and I've got the math to show why. There's a lot of marketing out there that talks about tankless and how tankless is the greatest thing since sliced bread. As somebody who has a tankless, I agree. However, I only agree if it's a gas tankless. We refuse at Yarborough & Sons unless very specific criteria are met to install electric tankless water heaters and the reason is we have kind of two main reasons. One is about your comfort, your ability to use your appliance and get the most comfort out of your electric tankless water heater. The second is about your wallet and frankly how it's not worth the money pending the breakdown costs and how fast we've seen these things fail.