RinnaiRL75IN Tankless Hot Water Heater, 7.5 GPM, Natural Gas, Indoor Installation

Update as of 11/1/21.....OK... hot water stops(off and on) midstream without an obvious reason, so called for the repair guy.....1st time to do anything in almost 10 years.Update as of 7/5/17.....Still great, and have had zero issues.Update as of 11/12/14.....We have had our Rinnai installed now for about 44 months and it works extremely well. There can be a delay in hot water, or a cold water sandwich; if you change temperature quickly or turn off and then on after having it on for 15 seconds or more. It probably takes 30 seconds for ours to really heat up, and maybe 40-45 seconds to get really hot water in the dead of winter...this is slower than a tank heater and the only detriment I can note or am aware of at this point. Puts out plenty of HOT water for us as we can have 2 showers and laundry going in the dead of winter...it is no problem. We adjusted our tank to put out 140 degree water and we love it...again, especially in the winter. My wife used to fill our tub, and the old water heater would actually run out of hot water(it is a large tub).....this is never a problem again! I think beyond 3 uses at one time(shower, laundry, dishwash, etc) running you would have a capacity problem...or extrememly cold basement. There are two of us here most of the time with the occasional guests....2 1/2 bath, and Rinnai is in the basement and very close to our main shower/bathroom, so this helps the time as our upstairs shower can take a minute to get hot water when its cold. Also, getting water temp correct with a single turn knob may be an issue....the water temp only goes so low before it will cut off....but we found the minimum spot which is hot, but we turned up our Rinnai so we could get hotter water and ideally, more use or capacity at the same time. By the way it is not uncommon for our basement to be 50 or so degrees in the winter and this easily overcomes that. I cant say how much cash it has saved us really, but our propane bill has definitely not gone up...and I estimate our electric bill had actually dropped 10 bucks/mo., and that was with our electric going up 9% last year, and another 5% this year. We replaced the original house water heater that had gone bad after 6 years do to salt water getting through our reverse osmosis/charcoal filter/saline filtration system(we have very salty well water on the coast)and it backed into the original water heater due to a valve being left open....and then it literally ate our water heater from the inside out with just one soaking of brackish water(took about 6 months to destroy it, of course we didn't know it was happening until the rust color started to show up) but once the water started turning rusty it was obviously too late(and this was only a 6 yr old water heater. Also, since we have a whole house well reverse osmosis and double charcoal filters purified water running, we shouldnt have to flush our Rinnai like you are supposed to do with these every year(our water has about 60ppm tds), but you are supposed to flush/clean every year to remove buildup and sediments(we pay enough up front to not have this issue unless our filter goes bad or salt water gets through usually by human mistake). We paid less for this than our local plumber could buy them wholesale through his supplier(by about 150 bucks total). He said there is an even more efficient tankless Rinnai available if your interested? This got here in 2 days and just make sure to order the venting pipes and gas taps if you need them! We had our whole system installed for 1350 total.....so it cost us about 500 bucks more than a good replacement standard tank water heater....I am sure we have gotten this back or will be very close by the end of this year. I believe we have saved 15 bucks per month on average? Make sure your gas pipes have enough flow.....Ive heard this can be an issue also? We really love ours. If anything happened we would probably just upgrade to the more efficient unit. Our unit is about 3 years installed now, maybe longer and I see others have issues, but we really have to recommend at this point. I will edit should anything come up as I think this needs to last at least 12 years for the return to really pay off. Propane and electricity is getting more expensive and this helps through efficiency to combat costs. Installed 03/2012

We bought this Rinnai to replace an existing model that was 15 years old and kept having an alarm code for not getting enough air and therefore no hot water after about 5 minutes of use. It made showering very frustrating. We had a technician come and take the machine apart and clean it. They really didn't find anything and said it will probably need replacement.We also had a local agency come to give us an estimate to replace the Rinnai. The estimate was almost $10,000 with them wanting to rip out a section of wall in a bedroom so they could replace the intake/exhaust pipe. I started researching and after reading several reviews on Amazon realized this model was an almost identical replacement.My husband and father in law replaced this in one very long day. When taking down the old Rinnai and looking inside the intake/exhaust you could see where the air flow was being blocked by debris caused from condensation of the exhaust over time. The exhaust pipe is a good 25-30 feet long going out the roof of our house. Could the old Rinnai have been cleaned?? Maybe but at this point replacing it was the best option.The replacement took the a little less than 12 hours from beginning to end. Where the Rinnai was originally installed made it difficult to work on and they had to remove some concrete on a sonotube to hook up the cold water fitting but that was right at the end of the process. They also used a chimney sweep to clean the inside of the Rinnai intake/exhaust and there was tons of debris that came out. Not sure how we will keep this from happening again and taking the unit down to clean the intake out would be a huge ordeal.For now the new one is working great and we will worry about the rest later. Being an almost exact fit there was only a small amount of soldering that needed to be done. After cleaning the pipe, getting it installed on the wall (which was a huge pain drilling new holes into the concrete), hooking up the water pipes, turning the gas back on and checking lines for leaks, and adjusting the altitude switches inside the Rinnai, we were up and running with unlimited hot water again. It was a really long, frustrating day but it was worth it to save thousands of dollars.

This replaced an older model, which was running fine until 70 mph winds with a -15°F windchill factor fought and won against a 100+ year old rock and mortar foundation, freezing the copper tubing inside the heater!The plumber swapped in the new unit, replacing valves with those included, and had us back up and running in under an hour. (We were without hot water for a total of three weeks.)This review is more than a year later, and we've had no issues whatsoever with the new unit.