gas or electric

If you have the option of gas or elec, your best choice is gas. gas has a much faster recovery rate. Unless you use a great deal of hot water (ie: large whirlpool or a lot of laundry with hot water) a 40 gal gas w/h should suffice (if the house is LARGE or has 4 or more bathrooms you may want a larger w/h).

Are you talking LPG or Natural “gas”?

Electric hot water heating usually has a much slower recovery rate than “Gas” but electric is safer as far as fumes/venting are concerned.

Electric H/W is subject to failure during a black out, gas heaters have certain restrictions as to where and how they can be installed.

They do make commercial rapid recovery electric models BUT most of the ones I have serviced/installed are 440 volts.

Another point about electric POINT of use heaters are they can be placed near the basin for INSTANT
(limited) H/W .

This could save you a lot of money in installation as you only need one C/W pipe going to this fixture instead of the normal 2pipes PLUS return piping, with lots of stand by piping losses

Your gas supplier can tell you the price per cubic ft of fuel (this is the way your billed) THEN you have to find the actual BTU rating per CU FT.

Natural “gas” can vary in BTU rating from a low of 900 to a high of 1,200 BTU’s per CU FT and each supplier can tell you the exact heating value.

Then all you have to do is contact your electric power company and ask for the price of a kilowatt and times this by the constant 3.1492 which will give you the BTU rating per HR. If you want to figure your Watts per min use the constant 0.05688. Then you can figure out which one is cheaper to use.

The majority of the time Natural gas is cheaper BUT the poor folks who use LPG this past winter took one heck of a hit as the price of oil sky rocketed.

Talk to your local LMP and ask him/her for their recommendations, then ask WHY.

[Edited by SylvanLMP on 21 June 2000]