Tankless water heater and gas line upgrade in Morrisville

The scope

A 2007 house in Morrisville whose garage tank heater had started weeping at the base, which is a tank telling you it has weeks rather than months left. The owners wanted to move to a tankless unit, partly for the space and mostly because their two teenagers had made the recovery time an issue.

The challenge

A tankless heater is not a swap. It is a different appliance with different requirements, and the requirements are where these installations go wrong.

The gas demand is the first one. A tankless unit fires at several times the rate of the tank it replaces, and the existing branch line to the garage was sized for the tank. Running the new unit on that line would have starved it, which shows up as lukewarm water on a cold morning and gets blamed on the appliance.

The second is venting. A sealed combustion unit needs its own intake and exhaust, and the old atmospheric flue serving the tank was not it.

The third is the one that surprises people in this region: incoming water temperature. Groundwater here is cold enough in January that a unit sized on a summer flow rate will disappoint in winter. Two showers at once in July is a very different calculation from two showers at once in January.

What we did

Sean sized the unit from winter incoming temperature and the fixture count, not from the summer figure, which put it one model larger than the owners had been quoted elsewhere.

The gas line was resized from the meter, pressure tested and signed off before the appliance arrived. New sealed combustion venting through the garage wall with correct clearances, a condensate neutraliser to the drain, and isolation valves with service ports so the unit can be descaled without cutting anything.

Triangle water is hard enough that descaling matters, so it is on their maintenance schedule rather than left to be discovered when the flow rate drops.

Two fixtures with failed cartridges were replaced while the water was off.

The installation page covers the permit and inspection process that applies to all of this. We pulled it, scheduled it and met the inspector; the permit fee was itemised at cost.

The outcome

Two days on site. Endless hot water, which is the headline, and a gas system that can actually feed it, which is the part that decides whether the headline is true in February.

The owners are on our maintenance schedule for an annual descale. Finished 26 June 2026.