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Recirculation with water heaters is a feature that has been available for a long time. Recirculation essentially means circulating hot water throughout the building to provide hot water faster at the fixtures, at the users’ point.

With tankless water heaters, recirculation is a little bit different than we've done in the past with standard tanks. On a tankless water heater, we want to make sure that we control the recirculation properly, that we don't cycle the unit too often, then yet we still provide the hot water quickly enough for the end-user to save money on their water bill. By having hot water at the fixture, you now wait less time to get that hot water coming out of that faucet.

There are a couple of misunderstandings about recirculation and tankless water heaters. The first being the term instantaneous. A tankless water heater is not an instantaneous water heater, there still is some time that it takes to get the hot water from where it's at in the line out of that faucet. It may only be a few seconds, but it's not instantaneous, it's an on-demand water heater.

The second is that when I add recirculation to a tankless water heater if it's set up properly, that unit is not running all the time like we used to do with tanks. A tankless water heater will cycle and heat that water only when it's necessary.

The Navien tankless water heaters are available in multiple types including our NPE series which is a condensing unit. The NPE-A is a unit that has a built-in circulator and buffer tank, but it's also offered as a standard unit without those components in there. Both of those units are available as recirculation units if you set them up that way.

Along with that, our non-condensing NPN can also be used in a recirculation system, it just requires the addition of a few extra components.

The NPE series, our condensing unit, has what we call our A unit that A unit has the circulator and buffer tank built into it. There are two different modes in the recirculation features of the NPE series, what we call either internal recirculation or external recirculation.

Internal recirculation will circulate water just inside the unit itself to preheat the unit. That provides hot water almost immediately coming out of the unit itself cutting down the delivery time to the fixtures.

We can also do external recirculation with that unit, which is where we add an external recirculation loop, getting that hot water further down those lines and closer to our fixtures. Again, both modes cut down the amount of time that it takes to get hot water out of our faucets.

The controls on our NPE units and also on our NPN units, allow for multiple types of setup for recirculation control. When we operate an NPE unit, the condensing unit, we can set that up to do what's called intelligent recirc or intelligent preheating, that's a self-learning process. It learns how you use your hot water, and it will circulate at the appropriate time.

We can also set them up using a timer. The NPE series has a built-in one, three, or seven-day time schedule that you can set the specific times to recirculate.

There are options for a HotButton, our product that creates an on-demand type of circulation, along with the option to add an aquastat to recirculate that based on temperature.

So having multiple options we can control that system in whatever way works best for the end-user.

Recirculation benefits the end-user by delivering hot water faster to the fixtures, you don't wait so long to get hot water out of that faucet. But it's also a water-saving device because of that, faster delivery time, we’re not standing there waiting for the hot water to come out of the. faucet.

There are multiple setup options and multiple ways to connect recirculation. Talk to your contractor and let them know you're looking for a recirculation option. If you have any questions, you can visit our website Navieninc.com and check out any of the literature on the site.