[Greenbuilding] Opinions on electric tankless HW heaters?

[Reuben Deumling]

It is mostly habit--and what manufacturers are inclined to offer.
Once upon a time even gas water heaters here in the US had remote
(mechanical) switches to cycle them on and off. The manufacturers are
unlikely to have inquired of their customers whether they wanted to trade
off automation for higher energy usage in any of these categories. Can you
imagine a manufacturer of toilets in the sixties making noise about the fact
that their toilets now use as much as 6x more water per flush than had been
common a generation earlier? Or a manufacturer of gas ranges providing full
disclosure on the disappearance of the extra knob on the front with which to
turn the gas to the oven burner on? No. Instead everyone got used to pilot
lights that burned all the time, and then, when pilot lights fell into
disfavor (for gas ranges in the US in the mid-eighties) do you imagine the
solution was accompanied by full disclosure that you would now not be able
to use your gas oven in the event of a power outage? That the glow bar
required 110V power and was a much more failure prone and expensive
replacement part than anything that had come before?

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Ocean Swells <swell at labranch.com> wrote:

> My fiances family, in Taiwan, uses a timer, to turn on, and off, the
> hot water boiler, in the mornings and the evenings when the family
> takes their showers and washes their dishes.
>
>
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