Hot water heaters play an integral role in promoting safety throughout a variety of settings, making performance an absolute must.

There are numerous industries out there that require hot water for safety operations. In a manufacturing plant that needs to deal with harmful chemicals, people need to be able to rinse themselves at a moment's notice in order to avoid any health issues. In other situations, food or other ingestible products need to be thoroughly cleaned before that can be sent to the market.

No matter the situation, you need to be able to ensure your hot water is ready to go and meet the required safety temperature standards, whether they are the ANSI Z358.1 tepid water standards for eye wash and shower drench standards or the FDA's standards for washdowns. Because tankless water heaters can be installed at the point of use, and provide hot water on demand, they are ideal for ensuring that users have hot water as soon as they need it. The following are three places where hot water heaters can help improve safety.

Chemical plants
There are a variety of chemical plants in today's economy ranging from oil refineries to wastewater treatment centers. Depending on the nature of a plant's operations, the kinds of chemicals that are used can differ but it is likely that they are all capable of causing bodily harm in some capacity. If these chemicals were to get on a workers skin, it would require an immediate cleansing.

Drench showers and face/eyewash stations are required throughout these plants. Tankless hot water heaters can ensure that these stations meet ANSI tepid water standards so that they are not too hot or too cold, and can effectively clean a worker.

Pharmaceutical plants
Sterilization when it comes to medicine and medical devices is absolutely necessary to ensure that these products do what they are intended. As a result, they need to be subject to large scale washdowns in order to sanitize them from bacteria and other microbes. The U.S. Food and Drug administrations has varying levels of temperature requirements, depending on what needs to be cleaned. Regardless of these requirements, you need to be sure that your hot water can get warm enough to meet them. Having a tankless hot water heater that can reach up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit in order to properly sanitize an area.

Hospitals
Hot water is always in high demand in hospitals. Much like in a pharmaceutical plant, sanitation is of the utmost importance. Be it in the operating room, or the IVs that a patient might use on a day-to-day basis, these medical devices need to be properly cleaned so that no foreign contaminants find their way into patients. This requires extremely high water temperatures in order to make sure that a surgeons instruments are sterile. Tankless water heaters can ensure that these performance levels are met efficiently and immediately.

A note on performance
Electric tankless water heaters are among some of the highest performing water heating options on the market, in terms of efficiency and hot water supplies. However, not all are built the same.

Changes in water pressure can ultimately lead to fluctuations in temperature, meaning that the ideal temperature at a certain flow rate could spike if that flow rate is reduced. There are a few solutions to making sure that this hotter water doesn't reach the user. One will flush the water immediately onto the floor, which effectively gets rid of the hot water, but creates new safety hazards through the wet surface. If you are looking to improve work site safety, you may want to consider other kinds of tankless water heaters that can better regulate temperature and flow rate.