[Ryland]

I think the title says it all but here are the details.
about two months ago I installed an A.O Smith Vertex water heater, their 70,000 BTU 90% efficient, 50 gallon tank type, forced vent, natural gas water heater, I installed it mid month so my first bill was not something I felt like I should pay attention to, but today we had another utility bill show up, we've had this water heater installed for about a month and a half and this bill shows we used 4 therms of natural gas costing about 11 cents per day or about $3 for the last 28 days that we were billed for.
Compare that to our electric water heater that we removed that was about 10 years old, I figure it was costing $20 to $25 per month to heat with it.
Total installed cost was around $1,500 but our old water heater was going to need to be replaced anyway so we figured why not replace it before it starts leaking and causes damage and causes us to replace it on short notice with something that is not as good as we have now.
So if you look at it from the point of view of replacing a new electric that for whatever reason no longer has any value, with this new natural gas unit, pay back would be about 7 years, until I saw the notice that came with the bill that talked about rate increase, bringing the pay back closer to 5 years assuming there are no more rate increases and that our old water heater would have lasted that long as well.