Unreliability: What happens when tank systems fail, or there is more demand than supply? In the service industry, customer complaints are expensive and harmful to the company's reputation. While a few family members in a home might wait for a water heater to recover before taking a shower or doing laundry, that is not an option in commercial operations. Imagine employees in a manufacturing facility waiting to wash their hands until the system renews itself.

Lack of Longevity: According to the U.S. Dept. of Energy, storage water heaters have a lifespan of 10 to 15 years.¹ That can be as little as seven years if the tank is not maintained by flushing and replacing the sacrificial anode designed to counteract minerals that can eat away the inside wall of the tank. And commercial tank-style water heaters can fail even more often. Consider what happens in a hotel or restaurant when the hot water system goes out, and the operation grinds to a halt. Those affected include employees, suppliers, customers, and all ancillary operations. Huge impacts follow. Unfortunately, replacing a failing storage tank with a new one is no easy task. Large machinery might be needed to lift a large tank out. Scheduling that machinery and the crew required to make the switch complicates and potentially lengthens the outage.

Inefficiency: The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) states that the energy usage of storage tank systems is up to 34 percent more than the energy used for tankless systems, with increased resulting in operational costs and higher emissions. According to the DOE: If all commercial water heaters sold in the U.S. were ENERGY STAR certified, the energy cost savings would grow to nearly $890 million, and more than 17 billion pounds of annual greenhouse gas emissions would be prevented.

In a commercial example, the Worldmark Anaheim, a 246-unit hotel close to Disneyland, reduced its natural gas consumption by 30 percent after switching to a tankless system." In another example, Ruby's Inn in Utah saves about 7,000 gallons of propane each month after upgrading from tank water storage units to tankless systems.

Square footage needed: Boilers and tank-style water heaters are bulky with a large footprint and take up a correspondingly large area, along with required clearances to provide space for repair and maintenance personnel. {{question3}

FEATURES AND BENEFITS OF TANKLESS HOT WATER SYSTEMS

Just as Ruby's Inn evolved with the times, so too has the reliable production of hot water. Over the past 10 to 15 years, commercial tankless water heaters have evolved from an obscure and novel option to emerge as a growing mainstream water-heating specification. Commercial tankless water heaters have the versatility to meet a wide range of load types while offering reliability, energy-efficient performance, and a space-saving footprint. They're available in various capacities and can be combined into larger arrays for water output rates of several hundred gallons per minute. And they don't waste energy or space by keeping a large water tank hot at all hours.

How Tankless Systems Boost Performance in Commercial Buildings

Instead of storing water, tankless systems use a heat exchanger to heat water as it's needed in a building. For example, when a guest turns on a shower in a hotel, a propane or natural gas burner in the tankless unit quickly heats the heat exchanger. In very high-efficiency condensing models, incoming cold water is preheated from the combustion exhaust. Then, the water continues to be heated as it passes through the unit's heat exchanger and exits from the tankless unit at the hot-water outlet pipe, where it then flows to the shower or sink to meet the hot-water demand.

These impacts are significantly reduced when tankless systems are used. Generally speaking, systems that last 20 years or more–such as tankless water heating systems–help prevent interruptions to the facility.

Types of Commercial Tankless Water Heaters

Commercial tankless water heaters can be divided into two types: natural gas and propane powered, and electric powered. Gas and propane powered units are typically more energy efficient and cost efficient to run. Less propane is needed than natural gas to heat water. Gas and propane powered units can continue to operate in a power outage. Gas and propane powered units can further be divided into condensing units and non-condensing units. Condensing tankless water heaters use advanced condensing technology to transfer energy from exhaust gases before they are vented to the water, which makes them more efficient than non-condensing tankless water heater.

Flexibility for Peaks and Dips

One of the most important benefits of using tankless technology in commercial buildings is its flexibility in meeting a wide range of load types. Whereas a storage tank system has to be designed for a building's peak load and keep a full tank constantly heated, a tankless system can rely on just a portion of the tankless units during off-peak times. The tankless water heater can increase its combustion rate as the hot-water demand increases. When demand gets even higher, the system controller will turn on another tankless unit and share the demand across both units.

That means a system could be designed for a large peak load that requires several hundred gallons per minute of hot-water output but still responds well when only a tiny portion of that hot water is needed. Hotels are a particularly common use case for this strategy, says Jamie Lyons, a senior consultant with Newport Partners.

"Even though the peak demand for hot water happens really infrequently, they still have to be ready for it, or else they have unhappy customers," Lyons said. "The value proposition for tankless there is really strong because you can use an array of tankless units that can ramp up to meet the peak when it happens, even if it only happens a really small percentage of the time. You're ready for it, but you're not storing hundreds or thousands of gallons of hot water all the time."

Advanced technology is part of the equation. Instead of simply keeping water hot in a large storage tank, tankless systems use sophisticated controls to modulate the heating capacity of an individual unit higher or lower to meet the demand for hot water. In addition to the system bringing on additional units to share the load and increase output, the controller also spreads the duty cycle out so that one unit won't wear out before the rest.

At the Residence Inn by Marriott in Anaheim, California, for instance, the 17-unit tankless array includes 12 units to supply hot water to the 130 guest rooms and five units for the hotel's dining and laundry operations. Each tankless unit has a capacity of just under 200,000 Btus per hour. Because each individual tankless unit can modulate as low as 11,000 Btus per hour, the overall system has a huge capacity range from over 3 million down to 11,000 Btus per hour.

The Full Story of Ruby's Inn

Photo courtesy of Propane Education & Research Council

For most hotel operators, tour buses full of guests showing up to check in would be a great sign of a healthy property with low vacancies or vacancy rate.

But at Ruby's Inn, a major resort and tourist destination located near Bryce Canyon in Utah, an aging water-heating system made those tour buses a source of anxiety. The resort includes 19 buildings, 715 hotel rooms, three restaurants, an RV park, a campground, three swimming pools, and a facility that does 19 tons of daily laundry. On any given night, the resort could have up to 4,000 guests on the premises.

With that much demand, the resort's old water heating system was under a lot of strain.

"We've got some unique challenges in that a lot of our business is tour buses, and they show up late at night. The first thing they want to do is shower," says Lance Syrett, general manager of Ruby's Inn. "Historically, that's always been a problem because you just can't keep up with 40 showers at the same time."

Avoiding a Negative Guest Experience
One of the primary issues with the resort's water-heating infrastructure was a lack of redundancy in its boilers. If a unit went down, the resort could go for up to two hours without hot water. The negative impact on the guest experience was clear — and costly.

Ruby's Inn management brought in a tankless water heater manufacturer's commercial water heating team to assess the problem. With the help of the propane provider, the tankless manufacturer designed a customized system for the resort, with a plan for every building. The plan highlighted the efficiency and reliability of switching to a tankless water heating system.

The team came back with a 30 percent savings, which calculated a fuel savings of 7,000 gallons of propane per month.

The solution ultimately included 175 new propane tankless water heaters, 35 tankless rack systems, and four hybrid commercial water heating systems. With the more efficient tankless units in place, Ruby's Inn saves $6,000 per month on propane alone.

"There's no commercial business that can keep their doors open without hot water, so the reliability and the redundancy of a tankless water-heating system is really key to any business owner," said a representative of the tankless manufacturer.

History of Stewardship
Besides satisfying customers' hot water needs, reducing carbon emissions was critically important to the inn's owners.

Ruby's Inn was founded in 1916 by Lance Syrett's great-grandfather, Reuben "Ruby" Syrett, who bought the land sight unseen before Bryce Canyon became a national park. "He went up there and saw that with his wife and two children, and they said, 'This is absolutely beautiful, and we think people are going to want to come see this someday,'" Lance Syrett says.

Ruby Syrett got permission from the state of Utah to build a facility at the rim of the canyon called "Tourist Rest." In 1923, when Bryce Canyon became a national monument, Ruby Syrett moved Tourist Rest to the location of the ranch and named it Ruby's Inn. Over time, the inn grew to include multiple hotels, restaurants, and the RV park and campground.

Even today, however, Ruby's Inn remains on the frontier, with no natural gas line within 25 miles. In the place of natural gas, the resort has relied on propane for its water heating and other energy needs.

Propane serves as a clean form of energy for Ruby's Inn, which prides itself on being a steward of the environment at Bryce Canyon. "We like to think we're good stewards of the national park," Lance Syrett says. "We give back; we've got a lot of programs. We try to be as environmentally conscious as we can be. He called the installation of the new, efficient tankless water heaters "another rung in that ladder."