The reason we have 2 tankless heaters is so both of them are close to the point of use, which equals less wait time. I also drew our house plans to make sure my hot water use areas were "clustered" because of this. Due to the piping in our double wide, we have to wait up to 5 minutes for hot water from a tank heater. Ridiculous. I have played around with my parents' stuff and have never waited more than 10 or 12 seconds for hot water because their heaters are also near the point of use. Their and our tankless heaters are Rinnai, btw. The only instant hot water I have ever experienced was in a really nice hotel... ;-) I don't know how big our current tank is, but we often run out of hot water for our family of 4. I'm looking forward to never dealing with that again!! Vonda PS Hello to a fellow Arkansan. Might not be the greatest state in the Union, but it's home. :-)

how often do you lose power? if it is a lot, then go for a generator. if rare, then i would just get a kerosene heater or a Mr Buddy propane heater and only use them when necessary. my KeroSun 85 heats my shop just fine. when i fired it up a couple weeks ago it was the first time i had lit it in 2 years. the kero in it was over a year old back then. regardless, it fired right up and ran smoke free. also, if you have a gas oven/stove you can use them to heat the house for short periods of time. back when my wife and i were jsut dating her central heat went out inthe trailer she rented. we used the oven adn 1 burner onthe stove to heat the hosue for a week until the part came in. i would say the area we haeted was about the size of your cabin.

Hi all! I moved into my current home in August of 2017. I tried looking into getting this thing up and running, but got frustrated and gave up. I still haven't, and want to give it another shot. This propane fireplace is 20k btu Max. We have never used it, and from what I understand the previous owners of the house never did either. I've contacted several propane companies in the area, and they seem more interested in selling me propane service than anything else. I don't plan on using this often, and just don't want to sign up for service. I'd like to get a 100lb tank, or maybe two with an automatic switch type thing in between, which I have seen some people do. Right now there is nothing but a stub out outside the basement. What do I need as far as regulators etc. for a fireplace of this size? The fireplace is on the upper level, and is piped down to the basement and out of the wall.

The venting comment / CO warnings aren't necessarily to you mtvhike, if you understand those common sense things. It's for the person that reads this thread maybe years later. If a new thread started on this subject, there would be another similar warning in that thread if I were to post in it. Anyone reading such a thread needs to be aware of safety related things. Combustion air is often not thought of. -- a vent for flue gases is often times not enough. Without proper combustion air via a fresh air intake vent makes the gas burning appliance a CO maker -- which is extremely dangerous. For the most part the reason you need electric to run these things now is the ignition source to light the fuel. I doubt you would find a pilot light on one of these appliances now, they are all electronic ignition source. I suppose you could come up with a way to do this with a battery source power, but you would need some way to recharge that battery source at some point. If you have control knowledge with stored battery power, you could make this automatic. Obviously if the appliance required a fan to operate the amount of time it would operate without power would be limited.