The U.S. government is reexamining energy-efficiency standards for residential water heaters. A key part of this reexamination is to estimate life-cycle cost (LCC) using a Monte Carlo approach to capture the impact of uncertainty and variability in the input variables. This paper discusses the details of this approach for the energy consumption portion of the LCC analysis for several design options for gas-fired water heaters. The results show clear differences in the amount of energy consumption between different design options, even though the ranges of energy consumption for water heaters with any one design option overlap.

Units: Dual