After the heating and air conditioning equipment in your home, the next biggest energy user is your water heater. In fact, it can account for as much as 20% of your utility bill, so you may not want to wait until water is spilling out of the old one to replace it. Given the money you could save by putting in an energy efficient model today, you could very well save money in the long run by replacing it today.

In the recent past, a water heater was simply a storage tank with a natural gas heater that would crank on in attempt to keep the temperature of the water within a certain range. This process would continue all day long, day in and day out, no matter whether hot water was needed or not. As you can imagine, this burns a lot of extra natural gas, and, when compounded over time can become very expensive.

Nowadays, there are many more options with water heaters as they have become much more technologically advanced. Tankless water heaters or instant hot water heaters are the newest advancement and offer you hot water on demand. Instead of hot water endlessly sitting in a tank and being heated over and over again, it is instead flash heated as needed. The upside is that you don’t use all of the extra energy to keep the water heated. In addition to that, the tankless models have a much longer anticipated lifespan than the tank models.

However, changing to a tankless water heater is not without a downside. There is a delay in hot water reaching the faucet as the required warm up is calculated and the water is heated. Also, the size of venting and gas supply required are more substantial than with the traditional models, so you must consider this when swapping models. All things considered, if you are looking for an Eco friendly water heater and save some money, a tankless gas water heater may just be the ticket.

Joey Shepherd writes about Water Heaters at http://www.waterheateroptions.com