I've gotten a bit of a home owner's vocabulary now that I'll share in a bit. It's good to know this stuff but I kinda don't want to know sub-flooring, joists, dry wall, copper pipes, forced air, radiant heating, blah, blah, blah.
The next two items on tap is replacing our galvanized piping with copper piping. Galvanized pipes corrode and rust so we're replacing everything with copper pipes which doesn't do that I guess. We're also stacking our dryer on top of our washing machine which is exciting because it's giving us a ton more space. (I'm a tad domesticated.)
Anyway, I've been reading up on tankless water heaters and the benefits are:
- unlimited hot water
- space savings, since it's a small box
- energy savings since it's on demand hot water versus maintaining a hot water store
The cons seem to be that sometimes you have to wait for the hot water to get going which is lame if all you want to do is wash your hands or hand wash dishes.
The brand that people like I guess is Takagi. It's interesting to read up on it anyway, apparently the system can be used for radiant floor heating too. Probably not going to get a tankless water heater but it's cool when I hear other people get it installed, it's becoming quite popular and already used widely in the UK.
There are other energy efficient things we're looking at like insulation (easy to do, just need to get done) and solar panels (but not for another 5+ years). We've got energy efficient windows, a front loading washing machine, and that's about it on the being energy efficient stuff.