…and the feature that turned me off instantaneous HWS - you need a minimum flow rate to get it to turn on. A very efficient shower head might not do it and your example of ‘little bursts of hot water’ could not be replaced by a warm drizzle, instantaneous HWS dependent.
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Or cold drizzle as the heater sends through cold water while it shuts down and restarts. You won’t be flushing debris out of a wound under a low stream of warm water or any other situation where you only need a little hot water.
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I am fortunate that my instantaneous water heater is in very close proximity to the kitchen and bathroom. Therefore I do not have those issues you are referring to. I wouldn’t have any other system. As I do not have solar panels for direct solar hot water as previously mentioned, so this suits me fine.
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Proximity reduces the time it takes for the hot water to flow through from the heater to the tap and the volume of hot water wasted in filling the pipe but that applies to any hot water system. It is always a good idea to have the heater as close as possible to where the water will be used regardless of type.
Proximity does nothing for the time it takes the heater to switch on and heat nor the minimum flow that will keep it burning before the flow sensor turns it off.
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The current HWS is solar only - no electrical backup. This is only inconvenient during our Wet season - when the sun frequently doesn’t shine - but nobody would want a hot shower during our Wet, and I can always boil water for the dishes.
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Good grief being charged for a quote! I paid $104.00 for a local aircon company. The service technician came and inspected both units and fittings and cleaned my filters and showed me how easy it was to do this myself. It is now part of my regular home maintenance.
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Seemingly exorbitant call outs and charges for quotes have a rational basis in some business models. @irakip’s basic issue in this topic was that it was not made clear up front about the T&C of the call out fee.
Any time one sees an ad for ‘service guaranteed today’ or similar, where does one expect they get the tech from to come ‘now’ not ‘tomorrow’ or ‘some days hence’?
To meet the guarantee (expectation?) the business model requires excess staff be available to attend your house ‘virtually right now’, and that costs in overheads. How many excess staff? It depends on the market but if one rang them and they could not ‘attend today’ in these times they would get dinged for misleading or false advertising or minimally some 1-star reviews from potential customers in need who felt mislead by the advertising.
When a service model is not time critical, it employs staff and usually schedules the customer on a next available so the staff are always busy. Sometimes they will offer priority service for a premium, and they could have subbies to ring, or worst case they knock back a previously scheduled client and the premium price might be worth the ire they get from the now less happy customer who has been disadvantaged. That is a balancing act some businesses succeed and others fail at.
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Is this the character you called?
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No, different plumber. I’m in the NT.
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I’m not sure there are any real plumbers in the NT - I haven’t found one yet …
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I met a few there who managed to plumb the depths of …
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