Tank, tankless or indirect

zvalve

I am from the school of learning by doing. How hard is it to do a diy install on a tankless hot water heater. How do you Size the gas pipe for the unit? Should I contact my gas company? What about a diy install of an indirect water heater? I have a Dunkirk PVWB-4D boiler, natural gas, 105000btu/hr input, 84000 btu/ hr output. It old but can I add another zone to that? Which means shutting down an draining boiler? But I kind of have an emergency with a tank hot water heater and have a rental apartment in the same house so maybe I should do a quick and dirty new install of a cheap tank water heater and wait for warmer weather to do something more complicated.

Zman

Kind of a loaded question, What kind of DIY projects have you successfully tackled? Tankless heaters can have challenging venting and gas pipe sizing issues. I would not doing your first boiler drain/ repipe job in the winter without "plan b" in place?

HVACNUT

Just add the zone. I don't see the issue.

BTW, most of us went to the school of learning by doing. But it is a school, and most of us had teachers or have mentors, and did lots of book learnin'. Not YouTube.

hot_rod

Since you already have the boiler my first choice would be an indirect. It will involve some piping and control work.

If you need it quick and easy, and have a breaker panel nearby an electric tank, does the renter pay electric?, until you have time to do a repipe on the boiler for an indirect.

mikeg2015

I’d you are descent at sweating copper, indirect isn’t too hard to install. Just follow the manual.