Small water heater closet, any options for a HPWH?
Hi folks,
Our gas water heater is 16 years old and has been rumbling off and on, so it's time to look at replacement. I have been trying to find a heat pump system that would fit in the closet, but every person who has looked has said that's basically impossible. I have quotes for a gas heater replacement for now, but before I pull the trigger on that I want to take a last stab at finding a HPWH option.
We live in the SoCal area (San Gabriel Valley), and have a two story house with the water heater in a closet on the second floor. It's currently a 50 gallon GE gas heater. The closet door is 21.5 inches wide, and the closet is 25x25 inches...I can probably get another inch or two out of the door frame, or we just remove it completely and put a sliding door in. Height is a non-issue, the ceiling is around 9ft high and the door is about 7ft. The water heater closet is mounted near the center of the house, with a regular closet between it and the northern wall. There is an attic space up above that's not conditioned, though it can get pretty hot up there during the summer (we need to put some insulation and a fan up there I think). We don't have anyplace else that the water heater can realistically move to, the only possible place is the laundry room but I've been told that would require installing a new main line down the side of the house to get water there.
To this point I have only found a couple 50 gallon HPWH that will fit through the closet door as-is, and a couple more that are 22-23 inches. Those are undersized for the house (4 bed 3.5 bath), so though that might work for us we'd have to redo it if we had to sell anytime soon. We would need something quiet as it's in between all of the bedrooms. A split system would seem to be a good idea, but those are non-existent right now (the ones I see online don't seem to be for sale anywhere), and none of the plumbers I talked with could get ahold of one.
I've been working on this for a bit now, but we had the gas water heater stop recently (which was fortunately just a bad thermocouple), so I have to pull the trigger sometime soon. To me, it looks like the tech is just about to allow installations into our space, but it's just short of our needs and that's not going to change in the next few months. But, I'd still rather switch if we can, I want to get gas out of the house and we have solar panels. If anyone has any ideas on options I'd love to hear them, thanks!