With electricity hitting rates around $0.70/kwh with PG&E - gas isn’t usually a more expensive way to heat water.

PG&E in CA is criminally expensive. If you’re lucky to be in one of the cities in the bay that isn’t on it, you get incredibly cheap energy in comparison.

There are plenty of water heaters that use a pilot light. I’ve been in many homes where they all use pilot light based gas water heaters.

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mcswell 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wow, that is expensive electricity. Ours (Maryland) is around 12 cents/kwh. As I say, we have solar panels, so we have not paid anything for electricity for the last five years, except for a $6/month connection charge (I think that's going up to $10/month). So far we've gotten back a $couple hundred at the end of each year because our net usage is negative.

	▲	bradlys a day ago \| parent [-]
		You can’t even get money back from PG&E. At most, they’ll neutralize your bill every month to near zero. Any excess you create is typically not credited or rolled over. They really discourage solar in a variety of other ways as well.