Bowsher1973
New Member
My water heater doesn't produce enough hot water in the winter months, yet it's perfectly fine during summer months. My online research suggests the problem may be that my gas line is too small to run both the water heater (40,000 BTU) and the gas boiler (130,000 BTU) connected to this line. Both gas appliances run off of a 3/4" natural gas line, with 40 feet of pipe between the meter and the appliances (located next to each other), and maybe a half-dozen 90-degree elbows along the way. If I'm reading the charts correctly (and that's a big "IF"!!) it looks like 40 feet of 3/4" pipe only supports 136,000 BTU, and I assume the elbows decrease this capacity even further. So, okay, fine, I get it, technically my pipe is too small. [Insert joke here.] But here's what I want to understand, and I'm hoping someone on this forum can explain to me: since my boiler is not running constantly -- let's assume it's running for maybe 10 minutes out of every hour -- shouldn't the water heater be able to function just fine most of the time, struggling with a smaller flame for just the limited period of time when the boiler is on simultaneously? In other words, regardless of the pipe size, when I wake up in the morning and nobody's used any hot water for at least 8 hours, shouldn't there still be a full tank of hot water in the winter, just like there is in the summer, because the water heater has had all night to maintain the temperature? I mean, doesn't the internal thermostat in the water heater tell the flame to keep running, small or big, until the tank is full of hot water? I don't understand why would it matter that the water heater doesn't get its full capacity of gas for a fraction of each hour. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!!