Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an addition to my original review done on December 27, 2015. To date 178 readers found it helpful. I hope it is 178 lost sales for SE USA! 1. October 2010 - 2 new Tempra 36 heaters installed in a large newly built home (family of 5). Several thousand dollars more were spent to accommodate installation of these two heaters (extra electrical panel, beefier electrical cable from the street transformer, a larger street transformer upgrade and labor, of course) compared to regular tank heaters. 2. August 2013 - both heating elements failed one month apart. Both were replaced by SE under 3 year original purchase warranty. Or course, I paid for plumber’s labor. 3. December 2015 – one heating element failed. It was the one that was used a bit more than the other one. 6 months later the second one failed too. That is what I call “good” German engineered obsolescence. SE essentially said one freebee is enough and made me pay for the new heating elements stating that my water is “too aggressive, too alkaline” at pH 9.14 on a 1 to 14 point scale were pH 8 is perfect water. It is a deviation of 16% only from the norm. Conclusion – ZERO tolerance for any kind of variation in water quality is built into this heater; which of course would be very logical and practical to do (unless you want to milk stupid and “rich” Americans). Ha-ha-ha (with a thick German accent). This time I get hit for labor plus heating elements. 4. December 2017 – one heating element failed almost to a day with the previous one. The other one is still going on. But we now have 3 people living in a house not 5. Tell me now that Germans are not great engineers! I was too busy with work this time to deal with the issue before Christmas. Just was running into the attic to reset the thermal cut out switch about 10 times a day. I am getting really tired of this POS heater. Wanted to post continuation of my SE saga. However, Amazon now is preventing me from doing it citing their verified customer reviews only. Thus, I am updating my original review. More BS from big corporations! .....ORIGINAL 2015 REVIEW.... ONLY BUY THEM IF YOU KNOW YOUR WATER CHEMICAL COMPOSITION IS NEAR PERFECT, OR BE READY TO SPEND MORE MONEY ON REPLACEMENT OR WATER TREATMENT SYSTEMS. I am now on my second set of two SE Tempra 36 heaters. I have had two installed in my new house 5 years ago. The first two started to malfunction (thermal cut off switch triggered) after about 2.5 years of use. I got them replaced using manufacturers 3-year warranty. I thought they were simply defective as I have seen plenty of SE water heaters when we lived in Germany that were 10 and over years old. The second two started having the same issue almost exactly at the same age as the previous two. SE got my water tested. The water pH tested at 9.1 where 7 is neutral on a scale from 1 to 14. The SE support folks told me that this is quite a tough problem to solve as most water conditioners fight either the low pH problem or hard water (my water hardness was at about 68 ppm if i remember correctly). To make a long story short, I spent 3 hours on line looking for some water treatment device to inject acid solution into the water stream to lower pH to about 7 (neutral). I could not find any. The root cause of the problem is the SE heating element not turning off when the water flow was cut off. This in its turn leads to thermal cut off switch being triggered. I do not know what is the connection between the corroded heating element and water flow (two absolutely separate parts) but there is a definitive pattern. My case was far from being the only as the SE folks confirmed. To my question why SE will not engineer the unit to tolerate higher levels of water pH I received an answer that most likely units engineered with such high tolerances will be prohibitively expensive (???). Of course, SE refuses to replace the heaters or the heating elements since now my water was found be "bad". Unfortunately, most water in US will be "not good enough" for SE heaters. Buy it at your own risk. thanks