When choosing the hot water tank for a home or project, it is important to take into account the advice provided by experts. Rheem brings you the essential tips for a correct choice.

Water heaters are essential in homes, but they are not chosen in the same way as any other appliance. To know which is the ideal water heater, you have to take into account elements ranging from the type of consumption to even geographical situations that influence the choice.

Pablo Hergenreder, Rheem technical advisor, explained that consumption is defined by the number of people who are going to use the hot water tank. This is easier to calculate for the individual user. Developers must take into account the number of rooms in the apartments and also the number of showers that the home will have. "Calculating the consumption of a one-room apartment with a single bathroom is not the same as calculating it for a home that has three rooms and a single bathroom. There I have the presumption that in that same apartment there will be a family where more people can bathe consecutively. The developer or the user has to take this into account", exemplified Hergenreder.

In that sense, he explained the two fundamental characteristics that we must know about the equipment: water accumulation and recovery. The accumulation is the capacity in liters that a hot water tank can keep in reserve at the desired temperature. Recovery is the unit of measurement that allows us to know the water heating capacity of each hot water tank in a given period of time. To measure it, the amount of water that can be obtained in one hour is calculated, with a temperature rise of 20°C above the inlet water temperature. This is defined as “thermal jump”, that is, the difference between the water inlet temperature - which depends on the geographical location where the home is located - and the same temperature after the heating process.

An element that we must pay attention to is also the flow rate in liters per minute of showers and taps, which will define the hot water consumption of each installation (ranges from 8 l/m to 25 l/m) and consequently the performance of the hot water tank.

The advisor specified that when choosing an electric hot water tank, special care must be taken to choose the appropriate volume, which allows all hot water consumption needs to be met. In comparison, Gas equipment allows us to add the highest recovery in the calculation and thus use lower capacity equipment.

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