The Hot Water Holy War.

We find ourselves in the midst of a battle, meet our foe, the excel tankless hot water heater.

At first, we shared the same values and felt we could work together, be allies, we needed hot water, tankless claimed to have the resources to provide this to us, but it made promises it refuses to keep.

At first we thought it was just some minor oversights on tankless' part, you know, forgetting to mention it's batteries were duds and refused to ignite for a week and creating conflicts by requiring hard to procure fittings. But things became much more blatant and we realized some serious fundamental differences in our belief systems, we believed tankless should give us hot water, tankless did not.

We truly became concerned with this relationship when we noticed tankless was overreacted to a slight breeze blowing through the cockpit, and would proceed to shoot flames at us, but its petulant act of aggression wasn't without backlash, as it managed to singe a few of it's own wires in the process. We tried to help it out by dressing it's wounds and building a wind shield around its vents. This sign of good will on our part seemed to be getting through, it gave us a few good days of hot water, but it was short lived, communication began to break down and tankless would give us ten seconds of hot water and then shut off with no explanation at all.

Feeling we had done all we could do to so salvage diplomatic relations between our two nations, it was becoming increasingly obvious that peace would never be achieved but we will not go down without a fight!

 Time to prepare the troops and go medieval on this sucker, no more Mr. Nice guy.

All kidding aside we are still struggling with getting consistent hot water out of this stupid machine, we are getting pretty fed up with it. We are discovering that this is the goldilocks of water heaters, every single aspect has to be just right (and even then it's a crap shoot). With the metal case on the heater as it is supposed to be, the slightest breeze through the side vent, fans the flames and causes fire balls to fly out the bottom. A large breeze through the vents will blow out the flame entirely, thus requiring the faucets to be turned off and on again, usually us only getting a few seconds of hot water at a time and other times it won't ignite at all.

We finagled with the water pressure, we read a few reviews saying the water pressure needed to be consistent and forceful enough so we increased the pressure in the accumulator tank, but this still didn't produce constant heat. But once we took the metal case off completely, the flame ignites and we get hot water, a small breeze will waver the flame but it reignites itself instantly, no turning the water off and on again, but a large gust of wind and we have a flamethrower. 

This is not an ideal situation, we know the hot water heater can work but we don't know if we can create the kind of atmosphere required to make it work.

Who will win?