electric tankless water heater over oil burner

fishman1

I have a oil fired boiler and a super saver tank based on the oil prices would it be advagatages to install a electric tankless
for the summer time I live in Maine and then run the boiler in the winter with heat

beenthere

Would probably have to upgrade your electric service to use an electric tankless.

dougp23

I have always loved the super saver tank. I bet someone has run some numbers, but I don't think it costs a whole lot to run the boiler a few times during the day in the summer to keep the water hot.

Think about your costs: you'll need to buy the electric tankless, get it hooked up, maybe upgrade your panel, get it plumbed in, etc. How long will it take to recoup those costs over letting the boiler keep the water hot?

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beenthere

A regular tanked electric water heater would pay for itself in 3 to 4 years in most homes.

bubbler

I just put a 40G electric tank in to replace the tankless coil in my oil burner. The tank, drain pan, 50' of 10/2 NM, 30A breaker, and other fittings/bits/pieces ran me about $500-600, with the NM wire and tank representing the bulk.

An indirect fired tank like a Super-Stor was out of my price range... My guess is that even w/ $4/G home heating oil the SS would be on par with the cost to run an electric tank of similar capacity... does anyone know?

Electric tankless didn't seem to be a good option to me... initial cost is high, they have a huge current requirement that can tax a 200A service, I'm also unclear of their lifespan, in researching it the implication seemed to be that if you have a problem with scaling in your tankless coil like I did, you will have the same problem in an electric tankless--meaning problems with not getting efficient heat transfer. The idea of spending a couple of grand on a large tankless only to have it scale up in a few years and not provide the same temperature delta was not the way I wanted go.

...another thought, if you are in an area with frequent power disruptions you will have no way to provide hot water if you have an electric tankless. Even with a 40G electric tank you can still, reasonably, get a generator to run that...

At least with the 40G tank I can simply replace it in ~5 years for the cost of a new tank (today, about $260-300).

...not to mention that come late March or early April it's going to feel REAAAAAAALY good to flip the switch and stop the boiler from running at least once every 30-60 minutes.

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Daniel Holzman

This is actually a more complex question than it sounds. I had a similar issue in my house, I had indirect hot water heat off my oil fired boiler. Eventually the coil in the boiler sprang a leak, so I got rid of the super saver tank and replaced the setup with a 50 gallon GE Wellspring heat pump water heater. But in the process I analyzed how much money, if any, I would save by converting from oil to electric.

The important factors are the cost of the electric heater, the price of electricity, the price of oil, the efficiency of the oil heater, and the efficiency of the electric heater. At 18 cents per kilowatt hour, which is my MA rate, it turned out that the electric heat pump would save money, although not as much as I initially thought. In my case, the choice was pretty easy, since the cost to install a new coil in the boiler would have been about $1000, roughly comparable to the cost of the GE heat pump (after energy efficiency rebate). But you have to do the mathematics very carefully, accounting for efficiency factors, installation cost etc., and of course the answer varies with your utility rates.