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There are so many amazing things about living in EY. When people tell me about making aliyah…
I dread the thought of having to turn on the hot water boiler for an hour before taking a shower.
Am I the only one who finds hot water on demand a huge sacrifice?
It’s all about what you’re used to. When you get used to it, it’s not a big deal. And you usually don’t need an hour nowadays, but that might depend where you live.
But speaking of water temperature, it is much easier to do the dishes here on winter Friday nights – the water is not freezing like it is in the States!
Really, I think it comes down to how much do we appreciate the opportunity to live in EY? If we realized what a zchus it was…Moshe Rabeinu was chalishing for the opportunity to live in EY, with or without hot water. I know you’re not Moshe Rabeinu, and I am not trying to make you feel guilty, I am just trying to put things in perspective.
Easy solution- you install a timer, and set it to go on a bit before you normally take a shower. In the winter, when you cannot rely on the solar boiler for hot water during the day, you can set it to go for 1/2h stretches every few hours so that you always have hot water.
There are also instant hot water mini-boilers that can be connected to faucets so you don’t have to wait.
For the good or the bad, the gashmius aspect of living in E”Y has changed drastically over the past decade or 2, there is a lot less “sacrifice” to make aliya than there used to be.
Is that the only thing that’s bothering you? I’m sure you can get a normal boiler installed. I lived in Kiryat sefer for 2 years in a 1990’s building, and we didn’t have to turn on the hot water boiler for an hour before taking a shower.
There is something called a tankless water heater. They sell them at Home Depot (in the US). I’m sure they have them in Israel too. I’ve never used one but they’re supposed to heat the water almost instantly. It doesn’t use a tank, it just uses a heat exchanger to heat the water as it flows through a system of pipes.
I know someone in Israel who has something like that. I don’t know if it’s the same thing, but I think that either you don’t have to turn anything on at all, or you do turn something on but it’s instant.
The tankless heaters are supposed to be more efficient also, because you’re only heating up the water that you’re using.
They also take up less space because there’s no tank.
With the recent discoveries of natural gas reservoirs in Eretz Yisroel over the last few years, I would expect that the fuel costs to heat water and homes would stabilize, if not go down. That should help making larger-capacity hot water boilers more affordable to operate.
Of course, if these gas resources are principally for export then things might not change as much as one might hope.
blubluh: Though petrol and deisel can rise and fall with the market, there is not likely to be a similar market rhythm with gas, and the cost has only been rising. I am not at all a socialist, but there is a long tradition of such in EY, and there is a local loathing of what is called piggish capitalism. and in this I must agree. In this small market, there are very concentrated stratification of weath and power. Those making their living in monopolies do not generally pass on their lower costs.
OP and others, I am in the hot water business here, and if it takes an hour you need service. Even in the winter there is solar input and a fresh or maintained system should heat up in half hour to forty minutes. For those with very large households and those who just want on demand hot water there are gas fired wall furnaces that will give a fixed amount of hot water continually. These units also are routinely used for space heating.
Point of use heaters are small electric heaters that are spliced into the hot pipe of the showers. They are sold in hardware stores here but they not long lived because they succumb quickly to the calcification of our hard water.
+1LU on what really matters, but the water in my corner of yerushalim is ice cold in the winter.
Geordie, either you had a “junkers”, or in the new buildings they put huge racks of collectors on the roof piped in common, and pumped down to the tanks. From the individual tank’s thermal point of view, there are billion of Btus, or zillions of kilo-calories(depending on where you are from) available, and that size of collector bank will collect energy even in the winter. There are engineering and financial nightmares when these things go wrong, but its the up and coming thing with architects.
“The tank less sounds like a Plumbing Keurig.”
It’s actually better because you don’t have to use those expensive K-cups
And you don’t need to have it owned by a goy.
DY, what if you want to drink the water?
Why would you want to do that?
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