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Originally Posted by Daox
I recently put in a Steibl Eltron DHC-E 10 unit and love it so far. You can read about it here. It was really easy to install myself and has been working great. With me and my wife in the house I find that we use ~2-4 kWh/day for hot water. I don't see any reason to go with a tank water heater if you're going to go with electric hot water. You can get units for under $200 that should handle a household's water.
The DHC-E units are a little smarter than the DHC series in that they monitor outlet temperature. The DHC series (and most other electric tankless heaters) just dump X amount of power into the water and the water is heated up to whatever temperature it gets to. If the inlet temperature rises so does the outlet temperature. This is fine if you have a constant inlet temperature. However, these aren't recommended with solar hot water setups due to the variable inlet temperature. The DHC-E uses an outlet temperature sensor and you set the outlet temperature. The heater only puts in enough power to heat the water to the specified setting. If the water is already hot enough it doesn't even turn on. This is the one you want if you're thinking of future solar hot water.
The one downside is that these heaters require a lot of power when they are on. Mine is relatively small and I needed a 40A breaker for it. It will only heat water for one shower or faucet at a time. The copper wire is expensive, especially if you get a larger unit. I was able to get away with 25 feet of 8ga wire which wasn't too bad.
Unfortunately, I can't say anything for $ savings as I went from a horribly inefficient natural gas heater to this tankless unit. For me, the cost stayed about the same, but my household energy usage went down quite a bit when you consider how inefficient the natural gas heater was. |
Great info, Thanks! I might take a look at the larger Tempra units Steibel offers.