Best RV tankless water heater. Portable tankless water heaters for RV

To tankless or not to tankless? That is the question! How’s it going? Welcome to another episode! We want to talk to you about tankless water heaters, and our thoughts on them. We’ve had one. The reason we wanted to do this is we get questions often. I had done an install video and people ask us about our tankless water heater. And we wanted to give you the information after we have lived with one for the last year, and just our thoughts, and help you decide if you want one or if you should get one because we don’t think they’re for everybody. But we have thoroughly enjoyed ours. So let’s go ahead and dive into that.

Would we do it again? Absolutely! Without a doubt, we would definitely purchase another one for me. I love it. It’s been so much better for me just to have the tankless water heater. So let’s dive right into that.

What are the pros and cons of the water heater? The best thing about the tankless water heater is, for me, the endless shower. You can have hot water the entire time you’re showering. So we’re hooked up to full hookups. We don’t have to worry about how much water we’re using. I like being able to take a shower and feel like I’m not having to rush, or to do those submarine showers, or Boy Scout showers, whatever they’re called. So we live in submarine. Practically yes. I think that’s a great point because it’s not like you take forever showers but I think the key point to this is you don’t have to race the end of your hot water coming to you. You do not have to jump in, turn off the water, lather up, you know. Just take a shower because we’re living in this full-time. If you’re just using it as a camping tool, you may not care about that. But we live in this full-time as a family of four: myself, my wife, Eli, and Matt, our two sons. So that’s kind of a big deal to us to be able to feel more like a home and less like camping. I don’t want to feel like I’m camping all the time. An occasional trip which we’re going out to go camping – totally fine with that. Living in a trailer, don’t want to feel like I’m camping.

So there was just some luxury things that we wanted to do. This one was pretty high on your list. You don’t really care about taking a longer shower. One thing that we like is the recovery time. There is no recovery time. If you have propane, you have hot water. So we can get all four of us back to back through that shower quickly, and we can get out the door in the morning, if we’re going to something. We don’t have to worry about the water heater recovering in between, or doing dishes, or whatever. We just use the hot water when we want to use the hot water. And it’s there! Even if we had a larger family, we would still to get everybody into a shower in the morning and not have to worry about it.

So another pro to the water heater is being able to set your water temperature. And there’s going to be a pro and a con later on. But I’m not contradicting myself but I didn’t realize that I was going to enjoy being able to set the temperature for the hot water. If I want to take a 106 degree shower, then I just set it there. Or if it’s a hot summer day and I want to take something cooler, I adjust the temperature for that too. So I think that’s in the Pro column but for some people it might be a con.

I just go in there and I just turn on the hot water. I don’t add any cold water. When it does that to a temperature that feels comfortable. It’s really easy, and if you’re in there, and it’s like oh it’s too hot you can ask whoever’s out of the shower, you know, like hey bump it down two or three degrees for me, please. And it just adjusts, no problem.

Let’s slide right into our cons because some people might think that that’s a pain, or you get in there and it’s at the wrong temperature. Somebody took a colder one, whatever… But let’s get into the cons. The cons might be that I’ve heard some people complain that it uses way more propane than their current set up, and for us it’s not a big deal! I mean we’ve been going on over couple of months and we cook in our trailer all the time on propane. We don’t have a microwave, so everything we cook is usually on propane. If we wanted to save propane, we could save it there. But multiple meals a day usually breakfast, dinner, sometimes lunch, so a minimum of two meals a day getting made through propane. We do consume quite a bit and we take multiple showers between all of us doing dishes. We use a lot of hot water. We’re not going through a lot with only 230 pound tanks. I think that’s great. We’re going to go fill up here soon, and it’s going to be like 16 bucks to fill up for propane. And it’ll last us – it’s summer right now, we’re not using it for heater right now – at least two months, possibly even into the third month.

It is a con for some people. A lot of the water heaters that come in your rig in your unit are a combination electric and propane. If you typically use it on electric, you’re obviously can be using more propane because you’re going to be now on propane with a tankless water heater.

I think the biggest drawback to the water heater for me is the delay in time to get your hot water. When you go to turn on the faucet, there’s always going to be a delay getting that hot water from your unit, whether it’s tankless or tanked, – unless you have a point of views right at the sink – to your fixture. So there’s going to be that delay depending on how far your piping is. That’s just physics. I mean that’s going to happen. But the tankless water heater has to know to turn on. That’s usually around 3 to 5 seconds. It sees that you’ve turned it on, and now there’s a water flow, water flow kick on producing hot water. So you’re going to get a three to five second delay which isn’t really a pain. But the area that it I think it shows most is when your boondocking, and you want to conserve water, so you’re going to be taking super short showers. And if you do that Boy Scout shower, or submarine shower, or whatever you call it, you turn on the water, you lather up, so you’ve turned it off in that time. When you turn it back on, you’re going to get some lukewarm water before the hot water comes again. That’s going to happen. But for us it’s not a deal breaker, for some – it might be. If that’s a deal breaker for you, we do not recommend you getting a tankless water heater.

Then I think the last con would be having to set your own temperature. This is going to get to the use of the unit. This is our recommendation. We didn’t get this from the manufacturer, from anybody. this isn’t sponsored in any way. But for some people, they don’t want a hassle figuring out what temperature they want their shower at before they get in there. They just want to turn on the hot, turn on the cold. You just want to mix to whatever you’re used to mixing in at home and have it be the same on a trailer. But I think people need to understand that this is not a tank water heater, and you can’t use it exactly the same way. So if you’re going to do it, you need to set that temperature. And the reason why – if you just crank that water heater up to 120 degrees, and you hop in the shower, and it’s like man it’s scalding, and then you turn on too much cold water and then it deprives the amount of water going to your water
heater. And when the water flow is not meeting the required flow to turn on ,it’s just going to completely shut off it. When it completely shuts off. Then you’re messing with the hot and cold, and all of a sudden it’s scalding again, and then it’s freezing and scalding. And so I can see why people get very frustrated with it. But I think that the problem is it’s typically user error, not understanding how to use it right. I think that’s a huge, huge part of it.

But if you know how to set the temperature of water, they’re really close. Lately I’ve been adding some cold water in middle of summer, and it’s hot, and sometimes I want a little bit colder shower than I had, you can you can put in a little cold water but you don’t want to go overboard. It’s a very small adjustment. They don’t barely add any and then you can feel good or oh it needs a little bit more. But the other thing that I was going to mention is sometimes your water coming into your rig is a little bit warmer than what it normally would be. Maybe if it was in the middle of summer right now, our hose coming in it sits in the sun for a little bit, and so you have to let that cold water kind of go through first and then turn on the hot water. And it totally is adjusted to where you have it set.

One other time we’ve had that happen, where the water coming into the trailer was warmer, and it got it felt really warm. It was like summertime and the water tank for the RV park was sitting outside in the Sun. And it would bake and warm up. It is the best you would get warm water in your rig, even though you only had cold water on. When the water heater kicks on, it’s kicking it on above what you’re setting was. So that was probably the biggest pain that we’ve had with it and trying to go through those adjustments and settings. There are a few things you can do but that’s a rare circumstance that we’ve run into. That’s once or twice.

That were our thoughts. I love it. I would do it again in a heartbeat for sure. If you’re convinced that I would like to have a tankless water, here we have the Girard. It is not that it’s the only one out there. But we’re going to put a link in the description to that one, and down in there to the Amazon link so check that out if you want it. And you have to buy the door separate too. So there’ll be a link to the water heater unit and the door associated with it to be able to install into your own rig. I mean it fits right into the existing. You know, usually the six or ten gallon water heaters that come in RV. It is pretty easy install. I think that will do it for us today. And I hope you have a great day and we will hopefully see you on the road.