Paloma tankless gas water heaters

[hdlorant]

Anticipating new location does anyone have experience with Paloma tankless gas water heaters.

[TMOULTON]

I just had 2 Paloma water heaters installed at my mat and am very happy with the job they are doing so far.
I have not had one customer complain about not having any hot water.

[Howard]

I have seen people rare about these units, but they must be running either small mats or mats with all small machines. These units can only put out a max or about 2.5 gpm (or there abouts). Just do the math yourself, and you'll find they cannot possibly keep up with the flow required in a busy mat or one with large equipment. Take for example if you have a 50# washer, it nominally uses 100 gallons broken into 5 fill cycles. Thus, if a customer selects hot water it will require 20 gallons for the prewash and 20 gallons for the wash cycle. At 2.5 gpm it will take 8 minutes to fill just that one washer. Do you think your customers will put up with that. No what happens if you have more than that one washer in your mat.


Come on all you Paloma fans, prove me wrong!

[DavidS]

But you're not using 100% hot water to fill the machine.

Most Paloma models do not restrict the flow of water just to heat it. The water just doesn't reach desired temp.

You can also run those in series. If the the first stage doesn't get it to max, the second will.

You just have to know what your max water demand might be.

[Howard]

That's not true. If a customer selects hot than you are filling with 100% hot on the prewash and wash cylces. Running in series does not increase your flow, runnin in parallel would but that would not take care of the temperature problem. These units are not capable of handling many large machines, just do the math.

[DavidS]

If you spend $20,000 for a standard water heater, you can buy several tankless heaters to fill the need.

I think it could be made to work with multiple units. In series and parallel.

[Howard]

Yes, you could buy many, but by the time you manifold them and add controls you will probably be approaching a big number. Further, these units foul easily and will loose effeciency quickly. The manufacturers of real boilers bad mouth these things all the time - but they have an ax to grind. What convinced me not to go this route was the senior working supervisor from the gas company that told me these things just don't work in an industrial/commercial environment. He said they typically last about a year or two and then they are junk. His recommendation is to have two or three modulating boilers that are designed for the heavy flow you see in a laundromat.