How many gallons / litres is your home water heater?
We live in a suburban 4 bedroom detached home. I find that after my wife and kid shower, I’m stuck showering in cold water.
Are they using too much water or is my water heater just not big enough?
Edit: not my photo. We currently have a 50gal tank.
Have you ever flushed the tank? If there is sediment in it, you lose volume to that. But if you haven’t done it annually from new, you can cause more harm than good by starting to flush it now.
That’s a good sized heater. It could be filled with sediment and not working efficiently. If you haven’t emptied it recently, it might be worth it.
If it’s clean, you can try turning it up. It will make full-hot from your faucet hotter, so be careful of scalding yourself, but it will make the hot water last longer.
You could also get a slightly lower flow shower head. Using less water at a time will allow it to last longer and keep do better keeping up with the empty rate.
If none of that works or is something you want to try, you could always replace with a tankless and never run out. Though you’ll waste a bit more water each time you turn on the hot since it takes a few seconds to kick in, but you won’t run out.
Is 40gal-50gal normal for a home? Previous owners were an elderly couple. I’m sure it suited them well. But with our family of 3 with laundry and occasional dishwasher running, it seems like it’s just slightly not enough. Especially if we’re all trying to get ready for an event or have family staying with us.
Maybe I just need to get it serviced… Thanks!
Get it serviced, the most common cause of lack of water is sediment buildup around the heating elements.
If everything else is fine and the kids are older, turn the heat up. The tanks are all designed to go up to 140F. However by default the setting is lower in the US to prevent scalding 120-125F.
Looks like a standard 40gal, but I can’t say for sure without reading the label. In the end, if it doesn’t meet your needs, that’s mostly what matters. But I wouldn’t expect three people to be able to shower one after the other unless they were pretty quick at it, so it may be that others have different expectations.
Really? A home water heater doesn’t do 3 showers back to back to back? For the record that’s just a stock photo. We actually have a 50Gal. I just feel like when I was a kid growing up at my parents house, our heater could easily handle 7-8 showers in a row when we had relatives staying with us. Thanks for the reply!
Is it electeic or gas? Have you flushed it recently? What is the temperature set to? Does the hot water have a smell? It may simply be time to replace it. They dont last forever.
There are different heating element sizes for electric heaters and different burner btu ratings for gas heaters. You can have a big tank and low heating output, a small tank with a high output, or any other combo of those.
My solution is to buy the highest output heater with as big of a tank as you can find, crank the output to just below the flamethrower output level, and shower with my wife. It fixes most of the problems with a benefit of naked wife time.
I live on the gulf coast with a shitty power grid so we have gas powered tank heaters so it still works during an outage, otherwise I would probably go tankless.
