I don't know if replying to this post will help once again make this rise in the consciousness of the august members of this forum, but here goes...
Hi! I bought a ca. 1977 home in SE Michigan in 2001. I am currently looking for the third hot water heater which I will have owned.
I am looking for a new direct-vent gas *tank* water heater. I have had both a forced-vent A. O. Smith fail(1 for details) and a Bosch AquaStar 250SX which was NEVER right, out of the box...and never addressed by Bosch.(2 for details).
So I am looking for "most reliable" gas tank water heaters NOW (not from 20 years ago, when they lasted better, etc.), if you have noticed trends. Any ideas about tanks which, given attention, good sacrificial rods, etc., are tending to last longer (like in days of yore)?? THANKS!
Note:
Yes, I am doing my homework. Consumers' Reports, in its last "buying guide", basically said that, though it did the testing of tank water heaters, "they all performed about the same," so they decided to AVERAGE all of the info instead of reporting their test results...! How the heck does THIS represent the values for which CR has always stood, er, USED to stand...?
In reviewing the complaints at the BBB for the best-known brands, I find a typical drone:
- "new" hot water heater, NIB, was actually found to fail IMMEDIATELY;
- company, if it responds to the complaint, begins with
- get a licensed plumber at your expense to diagnose it
- if a part can be identified, you get it...eventually...for free under the warranty
- BUT, the part is supposed to be installed by a licensed plumber, at your expense
- AND, no guarantee that this is actually "the problem", because the unit never worked enough to figure out whether or not there might actually be OTHER problems masked by the first one, or which were perhaps the proximal cause of what appeared to be the first problem...
Now, I am at a bit of an impasse in evaluating the numbers there, because i) a lot of people will complain to their friends, family, neighbors, but not register a complaint with the BBB, so you pretty much have to assume that the complaints are UNDERreported; ii) it is hard to figure out, e.g., how many complaints per $1 M in sales, or 1k units, etc., of water heaters of a given type, because this is simply internal info and financial reports aggregate products, etc. Even comparing across manufacturers is difficult, because some make many items and others make fewer items.
But it seems you CAN say:
a) Manufacturers don't actually test their units. This is the only way to explain "new in box" being found to be "dud in box" even when fresh. Yeah, they may test every 1,000th unit, or so, but they have a lot of reports of "DIB" which belie their claims of amazing manufacturing quality, reliability, etc.
b) The parts you are offered are now cheap parts (China?), and may well be the basis of the problems you are trying to fix. The cheapness of parts is a consistent refrain in the chorus of bad experiences.
c-1) The warranty is essentially a gimmick. Without any of their own tech people--or even a network of "approved installers" who are contracted to provide warranty-related diagnostics, at least, then you truly are "on your own," esp. if you are being given crap parts to replace crap parts. Worse:
c-2) The warranty doesn't even help the consumer/installer when the unit fails to pass the "suitability for use" test, i.e., was defective from the get-go.
d) Life of tanks seems to be rather lesser than in the past. The difference between "gosh, it failed in 3-5 years" v. "previous tank went on forever" seems to indicate that yet another American industry has opted to trade off better engineering for higher profits...what a surprise, I know, I should have ask you to sit down before saying that. ;-)
e) "Customer service" and "technical assistance" are largely jokes for at least a few of the main manufacturers (Rheem, A. O. Smith). This is particularly troubling, because it means that, once the unit is paid for, manufacturers are tending to essentially wash their hands of ANY part in maintaining it...you know, the "what? that unit? I'm not even sure we ever made a unit with that identifier..." syndrome.
Water heater details:
1) The A. O. Smith was a forced-vent system which first had a failure of the diaphragm switch which proved the draft provided by the fan. I discovered that the particular switch on that particular model was something which was simply not available from ANY supply house/manufacturer...(unless you bought a new box/fan unit, I guess). I got around this problem and figured that, as long as the fan ran, it was fine.
I flushed the tank, tested the overpressure value regularly, replaced the sacrificial anode, and kept it running until it failed more generally.
Then, I became prey to the madness known as the TANKLESS WATER HEATER!
2) I installed a Bosch AquaStar 250SX NG tankless water heater.
It sucked from the get-go, not only because it cost a bit more than a standard tank would have, and not only because, reading the manufacturer's requirements after I bought it (big mistake), I needed to up my gas line to 1.25" and of course use Z-Vent(R) for the "flue" (both costly in money and time), but, when I got the thing limping along...well, that's all it did.
If you read reviews of it from around 2014, you'll see a whole set of things which mirror my own experience:
a tendency to both scald us (when set at a "max" temperature of 100 F...not 100 C, but 100 F), the sudden cold between cycling, a disturbing smell of gas (eventually traced to their own gas valve, using a gas sniffer), and a noise on startup (I didn't realize that this was a very common problem; I was more interested in the others), and wasting water at a nearby tap to try to make sure that the flow rate wouldn't sag...which doesn't save water or heat from gas or electricity...
I immediately called about the scald problem and was given a song-and-dance back then which was repeated just a week or so ago: oh, this can happen when the flow rate is too low. To me, this means that they don't understand what a temperature LIMIT should mean...because they apparently can't measure it--in spite of having power to the unit!--unless there is a certain amount of water flow... LMAO One tech at a boiler shop suggested that it would take a few milliseconds to detect the high temp, but that only means that they have engineers who are unaware of any of the technique which have been around for ages (like predicting where the temp is going via, e.g., numerical integration of the heat the sensor is seeing) for dealing with this. So much for "German engineering"...
The answer was as I have said above, and others found: get a tech out, then have the tech call us. Many who went down that road were in for big bills, lots of expenses, and no real solutions.
So yeah, even though CR, and other reviewers are pushing tankless water heaters, they lie about the "endless hot water" (it ends quite frequently, actually), and the costs...esp. when you are supposed to inspect no only the igniter/flame sensor unit every year--resulting in a destruction of the current gasket and the need for a new one lol--but also descale...in addition to the initial install costs.