Hot water heater options

Howdy folks,

I am considering upgrading to a tankless gas unit for useability and efficiency reasons. I am just not 100% sure I am barking up the right path.

I have a family of 3, two home during the day with limited hot water use. Three of us shower in the evening and run dishwasher at night on delay. We have an 80 gal elec unit now. Several nights we run out of hot water during showering. Two of my three take rather long showers.

So the "unlimited" option from a tankless unit is attractive to us for those reasons.

But I want to change to something that is going to help our energy costs along with fitting our needs.

Our electricity rate just went up to $0.08/kwh and my gas cost is $.045/therm. I have 240 to the current tank now, obviously. And nat gas about 15 feet away from where my current unit sits.

My current elec unit is around 11 years old, and hasn't been touched by us for the 7 years we have been in the home. Yeah I know.. my bad. So I figure it's running on borrowed time. I am just trying to do some preventative planning so it doesn't crap out tomorrow and us have to run to the home center to get another elec to just get us going.

I found some online calcs for sizing tankless units and we were in the low end of use. Around 150k btu/he is what I think we need.

I looked briefly for our Bradford white 80 gal elec unit and it seems they quit offering them in 240v? I did see some information about getting a 3ph 277 unit and swapping elements? Not a huge deal for me, but it seems like a pain for possibly not any benefit as we would be in the exact same spot as we are now.