Rising utility bills fuel sales of tankless water heaters
More homeowners are scrapping their traditional water heaters and replacing them with tankless ones. The higher upfront cost can be offset by long-term savings in energy and water costs.
Q. I see a lot of advertisements for tankless water heaters, but they always cost more than conventional water heaters. How do tankless heaters work? If I buy one, would it eventually save me money?
A. Tankless water heaters, sometimes called “instantaneous” or “on-demand” heaters, are much smaller than traditional heaters. Most are about the size of a small television.
When a hot-water tap that is linked to a tankless heater is turned on, cold water is piped through the tankless gizmo and is quickly heated by either a gas burner, an electric coil or a similar element. That means you do not have to wait several seconds or even minutes for hot water to start flowing, which in turn cuts your water usage and also eliminates the expense of constantly keeping the water inside a traditional 40- or 50-gallon tank hot through the use of a gas-fueled burner or electric power source.
The cost of buying a tankless water heater and having it professionally installed can vary widely, depending on the manufacturer, the difficulty of installation and other factors. But you should expect to spend between $1,500 and $2,500, according to cost-estimating website homewyse.com, which offers a free online calculator to price a variety of homerelated projects based on the property’s ZIP code.
Conventional heaters tend to cost $500 or $600 less than their tankless counterparts. But despite those upfront savings, the U.S. Department of Energy (energy.gov) reports that a certified Energy Star tankless heater can save the typical family $100 or more each year in utility expenses.
Those annual savings can be compounded, the DOE adds, because a tankless heater can last 20 years, while a conventional heater usually lasts only 10 to 15 years.
Of course, there are drawbacks of going tankless, too. For example, the hot-water stream from a faucet that is linked to a standard heater is usually much stronger, the DOE states. And you might have to buy two or more tankless units if you have a large family, a big house, or if you like to run your dishwasher and washing machine at the same time — especially while also taking a hot shower.
REAL ESTATE TRIVIA
Owners of a typical single-family home spend $2,060 for their annual gas and electric bills, the DOE states. About 29 percent is used to warm their house and another 13 percent to heat their water.
Q. I signed a one-year lease for my apartment in August, but now the landlord has informed me that the building is being sold. The new owner has since given me a written notice that I must vacate the premises within 30 days unless I agree to pay an extra $110 per month in rent. Is this legal?
A. Probably not.
Real estate laws in most areas require rental-property investors — like your building’s new owner — to honor terms of any existing leases signed by a previous owner, provided that the tenant makes the rental payments in a timely fashion and adheres to all other terms of the original agreement.
Of course, if you stop making your rental payments or break other terms of the lease, the new owner can evict you and then sue for any back rent you may owe and any damages that might be caused by you while living there or moving out. Contact your local rent board or similar agency for details about your rights.
Q. We recently retired to Arizona and were surprised to learn that people here don’t observe daylight saving time, which always required us to move our clocks one hour forward in the spring and one hour backward in the fall. That’s fine with us, but why don’t all the other states follow our new state’s lead?
A. Daylight saving time, or DST, was established in the United States in 1918 to save energy and also to preserve oil and fuel needed by the Army during World War I.
Most of the nation’s people were happy about the approval of DST because it gave them an extra hour of morning sunlight in autumn and another hour of light when spring came around.
Arizonans, though, did not like the idea. They complained that an extra hour of sunlight would just mean one more hour of the desert’s blistering heat, so they used their constitutional right to reject the federally approved measure.
A congressional proposal that was introduced in 2015 to force Arizona to adhere to the daylight-saving-time rule was quickly withdrawn after citizens and lawmakers from the Grand Canyon State testified that it would raise their airconditioning bills and worsen the nation’s energy crisis.
Hawaii does not observe DST either, largely because the state is relatively close to the equator — the midpoint of Earth where the sun and moon equally share their 24 hours of darkness and light, 365 days each year.
Some lawmakers in California are now considering the elimination of DST as well, thanks to the state’s famously sunny days and some recent reports that link the extra hour of nighttime darkness in autumn and winter to higher rates of mental depression and even suicide.
Send questions to David Myers, P.O. Box 4405, Culver City, CA 90231-2960, and we’ll try to respond in a future column.