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Choosing a hot water system

Every installer sells the type they fit. This is the neutral version: what each system needs from your house, what it does badly, and how to size it.

The choice is made by your house, not by the brochure

There are only four kinds of hot water system in an Australian home — gas, electric resistance, heat pump and solar thermal — and each comes as either a storage tank or a continuous flow (instantaneous) unit. Everything else is branding.

What decides the answer is usually not the system, it is the house: whether you have natural gas at the meter, how much room you have outside for a heat pump or a tank, which way your roof faces, how many people shower in the same hour, and what is already sitting on the slab. A heat pump needs airflow and a spot where its noise will not sit under a bedroom window. Solar thermal needs roof area and a backup element. Continuous flow never runs out but delivers a fixed flow rate, so two showers at once behave differently to a tank.

What we will not do on this site is quote you a number. Prices, rebates and running costs change by state and by year, and a figure written once and left online is worse than no figure at all. What does not change is which system suits which house, what questions to ask, and what a proper installation includes.

If you are here because the system you already have has stopped working, start with hot water faults instead — replacing a unit that only needs a part is the most expensive mistake in this whole category.

Hot water guides

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.