It takes a few minutes for my tankless water heater to warm up, so we end up wasting a lot of water in our shower. Is there a way to avoid this? A friend mentioned a “comfort valve” or something? What is it and how does it work? Or is there another solution? Thx!
Everyone is mentioning recirculation systems which will solve your problem. Just keep in mind that if you are constantly circulating the water through your heater, you will also be constantly heating the water. So you will stop wasting water and start wasting heat instead. It won’t be a huge amount and you may live somewhere you need to heat your house anyway.
Can I do the opposite? Water pressure in my town is very low, and our tank just can’t supply any two draws, so if someone has a shower, the dishes in the dishwasher just get dry-baked.
You could look into a booster pump. It would be installed as the first thing on your incoming water supply and can boost the pressure to something reasonable inside the house.
That assumes you have good piping throughout the house. If you had old galvanized iron or something similar, the problem might just be that you need to replace your pipes.
Idk the specifics, but probably. I’ve watched many videos on rainwater harvesting and they have storage tanks and pressure tanks.
I know it feels wasteful, but it’s a couple of pennies worth of water.
A couple of tricks I’ve seen in the zero waste forums is saving that water in a bucket and watering plants or flushing toilets with it.
With a tankless heater, there’s nothing to warm up. Hot water is basically instant when it comes out.
How far is your shower from the heater? Usually, long times to first heat are because you have to go through all the cold water sitting in the line before the hot water reaches you.
Yes, that. That’s a better explanation of the problem. Thanks. The shower is way on the other side of the house and up a floor.
They make instant recirculation pumps that cycle the water through the tankless in a loop and stop when the hot water gets back to the pump. We have one. If you don’t already have the return pipes for it, you’d need some additional plumbing work. (Either way, it should be professionally installed).
It’s the same system you’d have for a tank, but it can’t run all the time, or it burns up the heater. You have to trigger it. They make flow switches, but mine (new construction) was cheesed. I just set up a zigbee switch with a 1 minute timer to trigger the pump.
There are a few choices.
Easiest is go just use the toilet before your shower and turn on the shower before you use the toilet. If you time it right this wouldn’t waste water.
um, the goal is to get the heater going by drawing on the hot supply, right? I’ve only ever seen cold supply hooked up to a toilet. So emptying and refilling the toilet tank doesn’t use up the cooled water in the hot supply line. However, catching cooler shower water in a bucket and using this to manually flush the toilet doesn’t waste the water. It is a lot of effort though.
@sheeEttin got it. The point is you turn on the shower.and let.it run while using the toilet.
