Your water heater is one of the most important appliances in your home, so what happens when yours breaks down or fails? Benjamin Franklin Plumbing® of West Palm Beach offers water heater services including repairs, installation, and replacement. If you need a new water heater, it’s a good idea to understand your options.

Traditional Tank Systems


Most water heaters use a large storage tank to heat water and keep it ready for use. A tank-based system offers hot water pretty much on demand, but only until the tank empties. Once the available hot water is gone, it will take some time for the tank system to heat up a new batch of water for use throughout the building. Tank-based systems are generally reliable and easy to maintain, but they are very large and when problems arise they can be very costly to fix.

Tankless Water Heaters


An innovation in water heating technology is the tankless system, an electrical water system that heats water on demand instead of storing hot water for later use. These systems are incredibly efficient as they only run and heat water when needed. When you turn on the hot water tap, the system will kick on and start heating water quickly. The drawback to this system is that it can take some time to heat up your water, but the tradeoff is lower operating costs and a smaller, easier to maintain system.

So which one is best for you? If you don’t use much hot water on a regular basis, a tankless system may provide exactly the amount you need at a fraction of the cost of maintaining a standard tank system. A tankless system comes with a big higher upfront cost due to the sophisticated nature of these systems, but they generally require less upkeep than tank-based systems. Whichever you choose, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing® of West Palm Beach can handle repairs, installation, and replacement.