| Back in 2010, I installed a Takagi tankless water heater at my house. Since we had just moved into the house, the main thing that we found which needed to be "fixed" was the old tank style water heater -it was inefficient, would quickly run out of hot water, and was well over 10 years old.
Having done quite a bit of research on the topic already, being here at PlumbingSupply.com, I had a few quality tankless water heaters that I'd reviewed. So I had to look at how and where I wanted to install a new tankless heater. We had decided that we wanted to convert our garage into a library and office space, so that made us have to consider installing either a direct vented kit (since this garage was now going to be a "living space" we can't have the combustible air being drawn from the same area), or an outdoor water heater. As we live in warm and sunny California, we didn't really need to be too worried about freezing conditions, as well as the heater has built-in freeze protection. It is much more cost effective to be able to install the tankless heater outdoors, there's no need for the long stainless steel venting pipe, the direct vent kit, and can now make better use of my space in the garage for storage.
The next concern we had for installing the water heater outdoors is that the tankless water heaters have different requirements for the space allowances around the heater itself; they put off heat and exhaust from the natural (or propane) gas being burned to heat the water. If you have any windows, or doors, or sidewalks nearby those can be an issue if you don't have enough clearance. We wound up choosing Takagi's T-K4-OS outdoor water heater because of the close space we were working with and their outdoor model allows you to get pretty close to it while still being safe (very important as we have kids and a dog). It was also a great selection because we had the gas main right there to tap into, and all of our bathrooms were on that side of the house, making everything more efficient by having less travel time for the hot water to get to our showers.
This unit has worked great for us and we have seen our gas bill reduced significantly. Though we have had some learning curves with the kids, in that when taking a shower they need to be mindful to not be wasting energy or water. Our kids do appear to be pretty well accustomed to this attitude as we recycle and practice living without being wasteful. As a reminder, though, it was a good idea for us to have a timer for showers and we've seen shower time not take nearly as long as it once did.
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