V53DeP Propane Tankless Water Heater

Buy it. We have a much bigger rannai on primary residence and it is 12 years old and I've never serviced/flushed it as advised. We (2 teenagers me and wife) have had zero issues and the gals take lots of long showers, shave or whatever. Bought this one for a weekend tiny house/Park model RV/trailer. Much smaller capacity than my primary residence unit but happy to see it was the same quality, basic physical size and function . Just hook up 120v to unit for the ignighter, plumb in your gas and water lines and fire it up. Runs shower, kitchen faucet and bath faucet all on full hot with 115 deg water with no issue. Only have 3 fixtures so not sure how many more it could handle. Factory preset to 115 deg but changeable with dip switches to hotter or cooler. Came very securely packed. I installed service valves but will likely never service it. If I can get 12 plus years out of it without paying it any attention I'm happy. Doesn't come with a temperature controller but in 12 years we've only touched the one on my other unit when we moved it to paint the wall. We keep it set to 115 or maybe 120 default to be safe for any kids. That's too hot to hold your hand under anyway so never had a need to adjust. We have this unit plumbed to standard 20lb/30LB propane cylinders and it doesn't mind. Gained a free closet by replacing our tank unit with this one mounted on the outside wall instead of the inside wall.

This is working great for our beach bungalow!

Have had this up and running for almost a year. Have had no problems, works great. It’s outside and the lowest temperature it has seen is about 5 degrees. Worked great the whole time. No water pressure issues, and it gets hot very fast. 10/10 recommend

i've worked with rinnai, bosch, and takagi tankless heaters. this little rinnai V53De is built with same high quality stuffs inside as the full sized units just the burner unit and exchanger are smaller. great deal for the buck. easy access to the flame rod for cleaning. this is critical if you have dirty propane. oily and wet propane will cause the flame rod to develop surface oxides, aka "rust". two screws and can access, lightly make shiny again with fine steel wool, replace, and all the "misfire" codes go away. for a few months, or years, depends on your propane. anyways, installed one for a client, she loves can shower full blast. note, this tiny unit will make most propane regulators overload and will misfire. you need to make sure your regulator can handle 200,000btu or more if you plan to run this unit to its full rating. a proper dual-stage regulator is a must. standard bbq size single stage regulator wont handle full load. works so good i got one for myself. couple hundred gallons thru it so far good.

Just installed it today, so review may change. Install wasn’t bad at all. I was changing from electric to gas, so I did run a new gas line. Make sure you purge air from gas line several times before you start it up, or you will get a code 11 for no ignition.

TLDR: This is now my favorite appliance in our entire house. Just buy it. I bought this to replace an ecotemp tankless hot water heater that leaked within a year of purchase. I was hesitant to spend an extra ~$200 on this unit, but I can honestly say it was worth it for sure. Showers: Incredible. This changed the way all of our showers work for the better. It's so effective that I can now balance my shower more on the "cold side" of the dial as opposed to turning it all the way to "hot" with my last hot water heater. This means that I have full cold water pressure at the same time as full hot water. This leads to a very high pressure, very satisfyingly steamy shower. Efficiency: In my case, this water heater will pay for itself in propane savings over a year. It's THAT good. Seriously, this thing uses less than half of the amount of propane on my last unit. Heat: It gets HOT. I called up Rinnai service to ask how to change the temperature from whatever the standard is to 140 degrees F. Customer support picked up immediately and was very knowledgeable. They walked me through it in less than 5 minutes and now I have HOT water for my dishes and laundry. Power: I can wash my car with steaming hot (140 dgF) water @ 60 PSI easily. The unit never chokes or gets cold. I can run a dual-head shower while running the dishwasher. Control: You can run a trickle of hot water with this unit. My last unit would only kick on if you had the hot water turned at least to half strength. This one has very fine controls, operating flawlessly at around .5 GPM.

Second Rinnai unit that's experienced frozen coils when the temperature dipped to 10 F. That's despite building a housing for the unit to protect from wind, wrapping the unit with protective insulation and using electrical heat tape around the pipes and the unit itself. Worked well during warmed weather, but I can't recommend for freezing temperatures.

Bought this to replace a Rinnai R85 that lasted 20 years with zero maintenance. Hope this one last even a fraction as long. Easy so set up. Just needed to change the maximum temp from 120 to 140 degrees. ***One word of advise....before you go to all the trouble to install these, connect the power and make sure it fires up. I bought this same unit from the big orange store and it was DOA. They took it back without issue, but I wasted a lot of time mounting and connecting plumbing/electric to it only to have to remove it.

Have several of them. They work great, easy to install. Requires 3/4" propane line.

great product

we bought this tankless hot water heater to replace the eccotemp we bought the heat exchanger leaked after a year this tank is so much better the pilefiter had it up and running in three hours from the box I love it so much I am buying another one for our RV great value