Change is needed!

As many of you know; my brain is always thinking of different things. And some of the time I over-analyze things to death. Sometimes it is because of this over-analytical brain of mine that I come up with some amazing thoughts. The other day I had one of these epiphanies on the way to the plumbing supply house. Now some of this may be way over your heads, but this is what is in mine. I am re-doing my water lines under my house. I also am installing a Noritz tank-less hot water heater. The old way of plubing was: ¾” trunk lines running long distances in house; tank-type water heaters with ¾” supply lines; main water feeds of ¾”; and so-on…. Are you seeing a pattern here? I need to fill you in though; a tank-less water heater for most residential applications has only ½” copper running through it. But its connections are ¾”. Why are the connections ¾”? Well a couple of reasons: the old water heater lines are ¾” and with all the valves and connections; ¾” makes sense. But when you have a ¾” water line, there is about 8 oz of water per 3’ of line; were as in ½” there is 8 oz in 6’ of line. What does this matter? Remember that faucet across the house flowing only 1.5 gpm? In my home there is a 25’ ¾” run I put in. At 1.5gpm in the bathroom, it would take 25 seconds to get hot water; it does. If I ran this in ½” it would only take 11.3 seconds. I don’t know about you; but that looks like less than half the time and that is great! One more reason why raised foundations rule!