you save big time by not heating water when not in use, and like you said it takes time to get to the outlet but so do take systems, and i would NEVER use a recirculating system no matter what system i had
Why don’t you like recirculating systems? We just bought a house that has one (my first experience with them) and it is very slick having instant hot water. I wonder how much I’m paying per year for that little convenience.
Yes you save over the constant on off and pilot, the question that people just need to keep in mind is the savings worth the extra price? It’s like solar cells, no one really talks about cost to return, they just hype the immediate savings number. And I know back in the day when Tankless was just getting popular and I trained with Takagi a good part of the profits they talked about on a system installation was the long term servicing of the units with descaling and repalecement of heat exchangers which at least then were fairly thin copper.