Electric Water Heater Installation in Rowlett

An electric tank has no burner, so it has nothing to vent and nothing to ignite. That's the whole advantage. It can sit in an upstairs utility closet, a hallway alcove or a hot attic where a gas heater's flue would be a project, and in a garage it isn't bound by the 18-inch burner rule that gas units follow. In a house with no gas service at all it is the only storage option short of a heat pump.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration's 2020 survey counts electricity as the main water heating fuel in about 46% of American homes, against about 48% for natural gas. In Rowlett the power is delivered by Oncor, Texas's largest transmission and distribution utility, which tracking sites put at about 4.15 million customers. Oncor delivers the electricity but doesn't sell it, so your energy price depends on the retail plan you chose.

Physics sets a ceiling. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds, and it takes one BTU to raise a pound by one degree. If the incoming water is 55 degrees (an assumption here, not a measured Rowlett figure) and the tank is set to 120, each gallon needs about 542 BTU. One 4,500-watt element makes 15,354 BTU an hour, so even with no losses it can raise about 28 gallons an hour.

That is why electric tanks are sized a step above gas tanks for the same household. A gas tank with a 40,000 BTU burner has a much bigger engine. For a family of four with two showers back to back, 50 gallons of electric tank behaves differently from 50 gallons of gas, and the useful figure to compare is the first hour rating on the energy label, not the gallons.

It stops heating, and it keeps what it already holds. A well-insulated 50 gallon tank loses heat slowly, so the water in it stays usable for many hours, and a closed tank is also a reserve of potable water of up to 40 or 50 gallons if the supply fails. That's a modest benefit, but it was a real one in February 2021.

The Texas health department counted 246 deaths from Winter Storm Uri statewide, 22 of them in Dallas County, in a week when millions lost power. A household that wants hot water through an outage is better served by a gas tank with a standing pilot, and a household that doesn't can plan around the fact that its electric tank will be cold until the grid returns.

Rowlett's water is moderately hard according to the North Texas Municipal Water District, which supplies it. NTMWD's treated-water tables for its Wylie plant show 122 mg/L of total hardness in October 2022 and 160 mg/L in February 2023, about 7.1 to 9.3 grains per gallon when divided by the district's factor of 17.12. In an electric tank the scale builds on the elements, especially the lower one, which sits in the sediment. A scaled element runs hotter, wears out sooner and wastes power.

A yearly flush keeps most of that off the elements, and the lower element is the first thing to check if the water turns lukewarm. See the flushing guide for the steps.

Our shop at 5311 Boyd Boulevard is 0.9 miles in a straight line from the Downtown Rowlett DART station and 2.2 miles from Lake Park, where the newest homes are going up. In the all-electric new builds, an upgrade to a hybrid tank is the common request. In older streets, the common job is an electric tank in a closet that has outlived its life, and the question is whether to put in the same size or step up.

Listing records show homes in the area from 1983 to 2019, so a heater that was replaced once already is common, and the label date is where to begin. The post on reading the label shows where.