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Tankless are also useless if you don't have perfect water, and even if you do you have to descale them every year. The calcium, iron, and others in your water builds up in the small copper pipes, and an acidic cleaner is required to remove it. If youve ever used a Keurig it's similar.

Propane water tanks are pretty bulletproof. Even with bad water they just truck, and require no electricity to operate, unlike some other gas appliances.

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Where I live, tankless heaters are pretty wide-spread. They connect to 3-phase power supply, heating at a variable power level up to 24 kW [1]. They need almost no maintenance, nobody I know has ever descaled one. I think the better units directly run the heating wires through the water, so they do not calcify due to small surface area (or maybe the huge temperature gradient when operated breaks the calcification layer).

Usually you operate them until they break (maybe around 10 years), then get a replacement heater for like 400 €.

[1] https://www.stiebel-eltron.co.uk/en/products-solutions/dhw/i...

Here in Belgium, electricity metering is switching from merely "kWh/year" to peak power draw (kW). Running a heater at 24kW will become very expensive.

Is that on well water or city water? In the country in the U.S. every body has individual wells, which comes with a lot of iron and calcium.

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