What actually fails on a tankless in Davidson
Tankless units tell you what is wrong if you read them. Nearly every call starts with an error code, and the code plus the gas supply narrows it down long before anyone needs to open anything.
The local variable is the water. Yours comes from Charlotte Water. Where that supply is soft, scale is a slower problem here than the national troubleshooting guides assume, which means a unit throwing a temperature fault in Davidson is more often a flow sensor, an igniter or a gas supply problem than the limescale everyone reaches for first.
- Ignition and flame failure codes: gas supply, igniter or flame rod before anything more expensive.
- Cold water sandwich: usually a behaviour of the system rather than a fault, and worth explaining before selling you a fix.
- Flow sensor faults: common, cheap, and frequently misdiagnosed as a failing exchanger.
- Heat exchanger: the one genuinely terminal failure, and often still under a long manufacturer warranty. We check the serial before quoting.
What Davidson itself changes
Where the heaters sit
Utility room, closet and crawlspace in the older centre. Garage and attic in the newer subdivisions. Attic installs are the ones we want to know about on the phone, because a leak in an attic is a different urgency from a leak in a garage.
The housing in Davidson
Davidson is a college town with a genuinely old centre around the campus and a steady stream of newer building around it, some of it very recent. The older houses near the college have the problems old houses have: tight utility spaces, heaters fitted where there was room rather than where there should have been, and discharge pipes that were run before anyone was checking. The newer building is straightforward by comparison.