On-demand water heaters – do they work?
We have a new Thor brand class C motorhome with an tankless Girard Brand RV water heater. In the shower the water will temporarily turn warm after the hot water faucet is on and run for a while, but ...
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We just installed the Girard tankless, the newest gen. We are having issues with the copper inlet pipe freezing at night. None of the actual pipes freeze, and it runs its anti-freeze feature without issue, it's just freezing in the 3-ish inches of pipe from the inlet to the heating element.
Does anyone have any suggestions for preventing this?
We're considering turning the gas to the water heater off at night and just running the "hot" water tap in the bathroom to keep water moving. This concerns me though because then it can't run its freeze-prevention cycle to ensure the heating element is fully protected.
We've tried leaving the unit on and running the "hot" water at a flow low enough to not turn the unit on, but it continually throws error codes.
I've found that Atwood offers an "extreme cold" setup for their unit. Any opinions on whether or not this could be used on the Girard unit? I'm mostly just looking at the insulation aspect of the kit to wrap the inlet tube, and hopefully prevent it freezing there. The Girard and Atwood units seem similar in general overall design.
The Atwood "extreme cold" package can be found ***Link Removed***.
The installation manual for the kit is ***Link Removed***.
My husband currently lives in the camper for work, so normal winterization procedures aren't an option at this point in time.
Aside from that, we aren't having any major function issues, despite the very cold water temps we have here. There is slight fluctuation in temperature when it is running, but it is not extreme or unbearable. We think it work's pretty well overall.
Does anyone have any suggestions for preventing this?
We're considering turning the gas to the water heater off at night and just running the "hot" water tap in the bathroom to keep water moving. This concerns me though because then it can't run its freeze-prevention cycle to ensure the heating element is fully protected.
We've tried leaving the unit on and running the "hot" water at a flow low enough to not turn the unit on, but it continually throws error codes.
I've found that Atwood offers an "extreme cold" setup for their unit. Any opinions on whether or not this could be used on the Girard unit? I'm mostly just looking at the insulation aspect of the kit to wrap the inlet tube, and hopefully prevent it freezing there. The Girard and Atwood units seem similar in general overall design.
The Atwood "extreme cold" package can be found ***Link Removed***.
The installation manual for the kit is ***Link Removed***.
My husband currently lives in the camper for work, so normal winterization procedures aren't an option at this point in time.
Aside from that, we aren't having any major function issues, despite the very cold water temps we have here. There is slight fluctuation in temperature when it is running, but it is not extreme or unbearable. We think it work's pretty well overall.
