Dan, They have had tankless water heaters a lot longer than that. It is nearly 40 years ago I first saw them in England and they were usually very old and in very old buildings. The most common were a round cylinder like device about 8 inches in diameter and probably 30 inches tall hung on the wall over a sink. There was a gas line and a water line to the unit and a hot and cold valve to a spigot hanging over the basin. When lighted the gas ignited from a pilot sending flame up around closely packed fins radiating out from the center of the core with a copper line spiraling through them. The water was heated as it passed through the core and before coming out the spigot. The cold water tap would not cause the gas to ignite. There were two other valves, one to open the main gas and the other which allowed the pilot to be lighted.
The slum flat we first called home in West Ealing had the heater, more commonly known as a geyser connected to a coin operated gas meter along with an ancient gas range. The range did not employ pilot lights, you ignited your oven or burners (known as rings) or the grill with a match or a flint, there were also long battery powered glow lighters which were Janet's preference. In the bathroom which was shared with three other flats there was a big square geyser fixed to the wall over the back end of the tub with an exhaust pipe projecting out through a thin plywood panel installed in the place of a pane of glass in the window. The cold water would be run in from a tap on the usual end of the tub. The gas meter was up near the ceiling, the only way for most people to reach it would be to climb up on the sink or bring a chair down to the bathroom with you. It took between two shillings to 2 & 6 pence to fill the bath with good hot water. In the winter, the room was so cold that you would stand well wrapped until the bath was well full before slipping into the hot water. The kitchen range and the kitchen geyser were not vented and the room only 8 feet square, I suppose they counted on the poor fitting of the windows to allow for that. When they converted from manufactured gas to North Sea natural gas they replaced some of the parts in that ancient range but not the geysers. They had to replace the range of the old woman in the flat below us, I suppose because of the age of the unit they removed. It was a stinking old hulk we had to pass on the landing for weeks I remember, I marveled that it hadn't spontaneously combusted from the thick grease coating the entire thing. ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Rossi To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 2:04 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Re: Why Choose a Tankless Water Heater? I would say that "not perfected" is a bit strong since folks in Europe have been using tankless water heaters for a couple of decades now. Taking a quick look on www.rinnai.com and www.bosch.com looking at their residential models shows a minimum flow rate for activation of 0.5 or 0.6 GPM on most models. Some models went as high as 0.9 GPM, but those looked like much larger models. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.21.8/1340 - Release Date: 3/23/2008 6:50 PM [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
