What you can learn from a tankless water heater review

If you’ve been researching tankless (sometimes called on-demand or instant) hot water heaters on the web, you’ve probably noticed that many reviews are long on emotion and short on useful information.

If you have been trying to learn more ablout tankless water heaters by reading customer reviews, you are pointed in the right direction.

But you may get the idea from these that there is a high defect rate. No product is without its lemons but generally it takes a certain degree of quality for a company to build a name for itself.

In 1986 Motorola recognized this issue -that faulty products create bad will and wipes out profit - and began to look for ways to make high quality control part of the
product.

Their goal was to achieve 3.4 defects per million, or less. The project was called Six Sigma. By the late 1990s two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies had signed on with this concept. Today this method is credited with being a US business success.

For today's consumer this means a marketplace with a high level of defect-free products.

What the customer is saying about tankless hot water heaters...

1. People are more apt to write a review if they a dissatisfied with a product or service. Even though hundreds, even thousands of sales are made each year; you are seeing mostly the ones that went wrong.

2. Tankless water heaters have been vastly improved upon in the last few years so note the year the review was written.

3. Was the review written for the heater in question? We noticed many reviews were written about models other than the one listed on the site so their complaints were irrelevant, although reviews of models from the same manufacturer can be useful.

4. The same reviews written by the same people appear on many different sites, this is sometimes used as a marketing technique.

5. People love to write complaints, especially without admitting to the possibility of any culpability for a malfunction. Read reviews with a critical eye.

The three most common complaints/misunderstandings

1. Buyers take the terms “instantaneous” or “on-demand” by their literal meaning. It takes a few seconds to heat a gallon of water but a tankless heater does it a lot faster than a teakettle on the stove.

2. Buyers underestimated temperature rise for their locale and install a water heater that cannot meet their needs.

3. Temperature fluctuation can be a problem, which usually occurs only in the coldest months. This because the tankless heater is being asked to heat more water at a greater flow rate than it can handle. This can also be caused by fluctuating water pressure or current.

Take the time to write a review - good or bad - everyone benefits.

We have reviewed, on the following pages, each major brand of elecric water heater to help you select the one that is right for your needs.

Flow rate and other key words are illustrated on 3 Steps to Size A Tankless Hot Water Heater page.