Tankless Water Heaters and Water Softener Install in Calabasas

The property

A 2003 house in Calabasas, roughly 4,200 square feet, five bathrooms, with a single ageing storage tank heater in the utility room off the garage. The house was built for a family half the size of the one living in it now.

What the client asked for

The complaint was simple and it is the most common one we hear in a big house: the last person to shower gets cold water, and the water leaves white marks on the glass and the fixtures. He asked for a bigger water heater.

What we found on site

Two separate problems that people usually treat as one. The cold shower was a recovery problem, not a capacity problem, and a bigger tank would only have moved the failure point later in the morning. The white marks were hardness, which no water heater fixes. We also found the existing gas line and the venting had been sized for the original single tank, and the run to the far bathrooms was long enough that the wait for hot water was pushing gallons of clean water down the drain every morning.

How we worked, in order

1. Measured the actual demand rather than guessing: simultaneous fixture count, incoming water temperature and the hardness of the supply.
2. Specified two tankless units in a linked pair instead of one oversized unit, so the second only fires when demand calls for it.
3. Upgraded the gas supply and installed the venting to the manufacturer specification, permitted and inspected. This is not optional on a tankless install and it is where cut-price installs go wrong.
4. Built the manifold in hard pipe with isolation valves and service ports on both units, so either one can be serviced or descaled without shutting the house down.
5. Installed the water softener ahead of the heaters, with a bypass. Softening the supply is what protects the heat exchangers from scaling, so it belongs upstream, not as an afterthought.
6. Added a recirculation loop with a timer so the far bathrooms have hot water at the tap instead of running for a minute first.
7. Removed the old tank, made good the wall and floor, labelled every valve, and walked the client through descaling intervals and the softener salt schedule.

The decision we are proud of

Two linked units instead of one large one, and the softener upstream rather than downstream. A single big tankless unit is cheaper to install and it is what most quotes will show you. The problem is that it is a single point of failure in a house with five bathrooms: when it goes down the whole house has no hot water, and when demand is low it short-cycles. A linked pair gives redundancy, runs each unit in its efficient band, and lets us service one while the family still showers. Putting the softener upstream costs a little more pipework and adds years to the heat exchangers, because in this part of Los Angeles scale is what actually kills tankless units, not age.

What the client got that he did not ask for

Isolation and service valves on both units and a labelled manifold. It is unglamorous and it means the next person who works on this system, whether it is us or someone else, can do it in an hour instead of a day. Photograph a mechanical room and you can tell immediately whether the installer was thinking about the install or about the next ten years.