Continuous Gas Water Heater Controllers

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Handle9

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#2409415 29-Jan-2020 00:12

billgates: We put in a Stiebel 15l water heater tank in scullery for instant hot water as distance was going to be a bit from main gas califont unit to scullery.

IMO this is a much better thing to put your money into than controllers. Contnuous hot water is great if the califont is close to where the hot water is consumed. The problem with longer runs is the dead leg of cold water that has to be dumped before you get hot water. I'd also rather go up a size to make sure I had enough capacity rather than put money into cntrollers.

billgates

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#2409456 29-Jan-2020 08:24

Handle9:

IMO this is a much better thing to put your money into than controllers. Contnuous hot water is great if the califont is close to where the hot water is consumed. The problem with longer runs is the dead leg of cold water that has to be dumped before you get hot water. I'd also rather go up a size to make sure I had enough capacity rather than put money into cntrollers.

Controllers still have their place. We went with controllers as well so that we can fill the bathtub to a pre-set specific volume by pressing button and leaving to go do other things without worrying about turning the tap off on time to avoid overflow. A really good reason and this is a cost saving reason both from gas usage and water usage point of view is that you use a lot less of both if your temperatures are set and forget to what you have specified and you are not fiddling with the hot/cold every time you take a shower. In grand scheme of things, $400 for 2 controllers for a new build is worthwhile.

Do whatever you want to do man.

Paul1977

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#2409586 29-Jan-2020 11:23

CYaBro:
Paul1977:

OK, so what is the benefit of the Deluxe Kitchen Controller over the standard controller?

I understand the Deluxe bathroom one, as it will stop the water when the bath is full. But what does the Kitchen one do?

I think the only advantage of that one is that it links to the deluxe bathroom controller so the voice prompts can be heard from there as well, when the water stops etc.
So if you don't have the deluxe bathroom controller then don't get the deluxe kitchen one.

Thanks @CYaBro sounds like even if you do have the deluxe bathroom one the deluxe kitchen I e wouldn’t be worth it - unless you tend to wait in the kitchen for the bath to run?

dfnt

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#2409652 29-Jan-2020 12:57

We got the normal kitchen controller and deluxe bathroom controller

IMO it’s worth having one in each bathroom so the user can transfer priority to it.

We use our controllers daily, as we run the bathroom at 42 degrees and kitchen at 55 degrees. I don’t see the point in setting the temp high then mixing cold water to drop the temp back down again. Seems like a waste of gas and water.

SomeoneSomewhere

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#2409726 29-Jan-2020 14:42

dfnt: We got the normal kitchen controller and deluxe bathroom controller

IMO it’s worth having one in each bathroom so the user can transfer priority to it.

We use our controllers daily, as we run the bathroom at 42 degrees and kitchen at 55 degrees. I don’t see the point in setting the temp high then mixing cold water to drop the temp back down again. Seems like a waste of gas and water.

There's functionally no difference. You're consuming the same amount of water (because all the water that enters the system comes out your tap; it's not being dumped down a drain somewhere else), and as for energy usage, you're either heating a lot of water up a bit, or a bit of water up a lot.

Ignoring losses like flushing the pipes and through pipe insulation, heating 1L of water by 20C takes the same amount of energy however you do it.

Tracer

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#2411024 1-Feb-2020 08:42

The real advantage of setting the bathroom to 42 and running the mixer straight hot is that the temperature does not change, whether somebody else in the house turns on taps full bore or whatever.

Mighty Ape

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nickb800

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#2411031 1-Feb-2020 09:37

SomeoneSomewhere:
dfnt: We got the normal kitchen controller and deluxe bathroom controller

IMO it’s worth having one in each bathroom so the user can transfer priority to it.

We use our controllers daily, as we run the bathroom at 42 degrees and kitchen at 55 degrees. I don’t see the point in setting the temp high then mixing cold water to drop the temp back down again. Seems like a waste of gas and water.

There's functionally no difference. You're consuming the same amount of water (because all the water that enters the system comes out your tap; it's not being dumped down a drain somewhere else), and as for energy usage, you're either heating a lot of water up a bit, or a bit of water up a lot.

Ignoring losses like flushing the pipes and through pipe insulation, heating 1L of water by 20C takes the same amount of energy however you do it.

Gas water heating is a bit funny - tends to be more efficient when there's a lower differential between input and output temperature, hence heating a lot of water by a little bit can be cheaper than heating a little bit by a lot.

mkissin

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#2411045 1-Feb-2020 11:15

We have a Rinnai system with two controllers - a deluxe in the bathroom and a normal one in the kitchen.

The bathroom one is amazing. We can set it to fill the bath with 30 liters of water at 41 degrees and then just wander off and forget about it until the bath is ready. Don't need to worry about scalding our young boy, or overfilling the bath. Likewise, we just set it to whatever temperature we want the shower and then run the mixer full hot. It's slightly more efficient on the gas use, but it's mainly about the temperature fluctuations as others have mentioned.

The only downside to having the normal one in the kitchen is that it doesn't seem to properly realize when the deluxe bathroom controller is in "bath fill" mode. There's normally a red light that comes on when the hot water is being used but this doesn't work when the bath is filling and the temperature shown on the display can be wrong. It's a tiny thing though and doesn't bother me as the rest of the stuff all works well (i.e you can't snatch back priority with it or anything like that).

Paul1977

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#2412299 4-Feb-2020 11:07

We are going for 3 standard controllers.

Would have liked to add a fourth deluxe controller in the guest bathroom (which also has the bath), but can't as we're getting the new Rinnai N56kWe which strangely only allows a maximum of 3 controllers. The EF250 it is superseding could have 4 controllers.

We have 3 rooms that we feel need a controller for daily use, so the guest bathroom misses out unfortunately.

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