So now that we're having half our laundry room rebuilt from an ongoing exterior water leak that rotted out the entire outside facing wall and half my floor including the joists and ledger board on the foundation we were tossing around water heater ideas. Wow...long sentence there...

Currently I have a 50 gallon tall water heater that sits in plain view next to my washer and dryer. The two problems with this is that it's an eyesore and it's taking up valuable space in my tiny little Ballard house...Hey, at least I have a detached man cave that i can fit my drift boat and motorcycle in. haha.

Anyway, I was trying to think of alternate places to mount a water heater. I cannot go with a tankless water heater. See Below... Other than that I know they make short water heaters that i'd assume could be installed in your crawl space? That being said I'm not sure if it's mandatory that the tank discharge be visible to the occupants in the house or not? If it doesn't matter I don't see why I can't install a stubby water heater in the crawl space and then run the discharge pipe out through the foundation in case it has to relieve some pressure. Do any of you have water heaters installed in your crawl space? or Attic? The attic idea sounds scary though!

Here's why I can't go with a tankless water heter:

We looked into tankless water heaters but the problem there is that we don't have gas hookups without shelling out thousands for the city to hook me up from the street. Gas tankless water heaters are much more efficient in colder climates than electric. With ground water temperatures so low in the northwest you it takes a much higher "temperature rise" for the tankless water heater to reach your target hot water temp. For instance, If your ground water temp gets down to 40 degrees in the winter and your target hot water temperature is 120 degrees, the temperature rise is 80 degress. So, even if the tankless you buy is capable of 6 GPM output once you factor in super cold ground water temps the actual output may be only a gallon per minute. The solution to this is to get a high output tankless but they draw around 150 amps which would require getting a much larger electrical service installed, like up to 400 amps. I have a 200 amp service right now which is plenty for my needs and I can add a few things.