Parallel AND Series, water heaters

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Ed Dentrl

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I have been a long time lurker of these forums and made use of all of the great advice. Recently I purchased a home and found myself stumped. In general the house was overbuilt in every way. When I went to the basement to look at the plumbing I was left scratching my head.

In essence what I found was a complex series of valves that allowed the two water heaters to be shifted from series to parallel plumbing. At first it didn't make sense but after some Googling I realized what they had in place.

I've read about the advantage of both and come away with the feeling that most of the times leaving it in series makes most sense for the three of us in the house. When we have guests shifting it to parallel seems to make sense.

At the end of the day I haven't found any discussions about dual setups quite like this. Is there any downside other than more potential points of failure. Any input, opinion, or crackpot theory would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Ed
 

Reach4

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Most of the time, you could leave the first water heater off and let the second water heater handle the load. That way you are not losing heat from the first tank.

If the water heaters are fairly old (10 years?), you might want to consider a flush.

Any thought of inspecting or replacing anodes?
 

Ed Dentrl

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Thanks for the input! That confirms what I thought I read.

What got me going was the fact that these thing were plumbed in such a manner you could turn a couple shutoff and swap it between parallel and series. When researching I didn't come across that mentioned anywhere!

Definitely going to flush and check anodes as soon as we get through initial unboxing and setup. Already on the list but thanks for the reminder!
 

Master Plumber Mark

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Series works better than parallell... you cannot 100% be sure that they are drawing off both
water heaters equally in parallell and usually they are never plumbed perfectly..
...
over a short while, usually one of the units will clog shut at one of the dialectric unions ......
it just works out better to run them in series for a larger volume... In series, just setting
the first one on low and preheating the other one works out very well indeed......

when a heater leaks set i[ in parallell, we have seen a lot of people change it out
and install a completely different brand and they simply will not draw
off both correctly and evenly because of the tanks being different....

Lots of times we have torn out both and installed one 75 gallon because it is
a more efficient way to heat the water with less heat loss space....

now...... you get back on google and wrack your brain on that thought for a while......



YEE HAW...................
 
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Jadnashua

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Some combination of valve positions might let you isolate one of the tanks if it failed, giving you a bit more time to replace it while still having some hot water in the house.
 

Jadnashua

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Some combination of valve positions might let you isolate one of the tanks if it failed, giving you a bit more time to replace it while still having some hot water in the house.
 

Master Plumber Mark

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something else you can do if you so desire..... is simply install 2 water softener type bypasses ... we have done this before and
set them up for series.... I dont remember how we did it because it was so long ago,,,,but it can be done to isolate either water
heater if it were to leak... but its an absolute total pain in the ass to plumb and will make you cross eyed trying to
figure out which valves need to be in which position,,,,''

if you just install both water heaters up onto bricks and into drain pans that are piped to a near by drain then being in \
series wont hurt a thing if they some day one of them leaked.......

and of course any self respecting plumber who knew what he was doing
would naturally install a water heater in a pan to begin with...


Dont you agree HJ??

HEE HAW......

bricks.jpg
 
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