Water Heaterage, Revisited

     ...It occurs to me that one friend, who Tam was joshing in her comments, may feel hurt by my recent post.  I didn't intend that, and to the extent nitwitty "Greens" have pushed tankless water heaters on the easily-led, he's got a point.  It's just that I can't conceive choosing a water heater based on guilt or even on "saving the planet."*  Oh, I'd pass up coal (too dirty!), having been the landlady of a duplex formerly heated with coal: fifty or more years on, you'd still come down from the attic coated in the stuff, looking just like a coal miner (and the furnaces, gas-converted, were in the basement; there was not even so much as a duct in the above-the-second floor attic!).  Wouldn't care for fuel oil, either, unless it was the only option: there's always a whiff of it about.

     But tankless is a convenience, at least when it works, a convenience that sucks down gas or electricity at an astounding rate when it runs.  You'd think it would make Mother Gaia weep, especially assuming she understands what having to build distribution systems to meet peak demand implies!  Conversely, with a conventional unit, half the year it's helping heat my basement (and the other half, it's helping keep the damp at bay).  So either way, I win, just different prizes.

     And either way, it's a hearty "bug off!" to the freeze-in-the-dark set.
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* It's odd, they go on and on about "saving the earth," but let 'em catch you even once with 367,852 Mason jars fulla assorted and various kinds of farm and back yard dirt stacked up the basement and it doesn't matter how neatly those jars were stacked or how careful you were to label them for time, zodiacal sign and sky color when collected, they're all "72 hours for observation" and "evaluation of mental stability."  --Anyway, that's what I heard.