Frugal and Energy Efficient Living

I prefer things simple and a 40 gallon natural gas water heater with a standing pilot is about as simple a water heater as one can get. As the pilot flame alone produces enough hot water for me, it's cheap to use.

My experience with tankless is that they are quite reliable but are hard to work on when needed. A few years ago I spent a couple of hours working on one where a dead fly was the cause of the problem. It had lodged itself in front of an orifice. About an hour to disassemble the water heater to find the problem and another hour to put it back together again and test. Pretty expensive fly.

A few, with kids, who had them installed found their water bill to go way up as the kids then took very, very long showers whereas before they didn't because they'd run out of hot water with the previous water heater.