Aquanta web site. I’m going to be replacing my aging water heater soon and am thinking about getting an Aquanta as well. If you have one, do you perceive it as a good value? Does it give useful information? Does it save you money?
We just replaced our water heater last summer and I was going to get one, but it winds up the gas valve on the new one isn’t electric/compatible with Aquanta, so alas, not for me. 
I’ve had an Aquanta for several years now. I honestly can’t say whether it’s actually saved me any money/electricity or not…The nice thing is that I can schedule it to turn off if I’m going to be out of town for any period of time so I don’t waste any electricity heating water I’m not using.
Sense does a much better job of letting me know when the hot water is being heated or not (Aquanta doesn’t have a simple indicator in the app that tells you the status, and I’ve specifically requested this at least twice).
I don’t even know how good of a job Aquanta does with knowing usage/heating because it has 2 temp sensors; one on the cold water inlet, and one on the hot water outlet. When you use hot water, the cold water inlet gets colder, and this is how they measure usage; To me, that’s not going to be very accurate, but maybe I’m wrong.
Obviously Aquanta can see your electricity usage since it has total control of the power going into the tank, so that’s probably fairly accurate. And Aquanta has the ability to use your local power company’s TOU rate plan (if they don’t have it, you can send it to them to add to the list), so in theory, that is supposed to save you money also by heating in non-peak hours.
Just my experience with it. YMMV
Electric tank heaters have very very low standby losses. This type of device is probably not worth the hassle in a house with daily hot water usage. For a vacation or weekend house, it could make sense.
My current one does. It’s one of the reason’s I’m replacing it. I know I could get an insulation blanket, but it’s 17 years old and I don’t think the previous owner maintained it. Probably just best to replace it before it fails at this point.
If I lose power, the water in the tank is barely lukewarm 12 hours later.
The replacement I’m looking at is a Rheem that has the wifi Econet system built in, but reviews for that are very mixed.
You might want to take a look at Rheem Marathon water heaters. This is a product line Rheem got from an acquisition of Marathon a while back. The tanks are all plastic and foam insulated. They will last forever.
They’re quite a bit more expensive than a conventional electric tank, but if you can find a supply house to sell you one, you can get them in the $7-800 range instead of the $1200 range they’re available for through the normal retail channels.
another alternative is the Westinghouse Stainless Steel 316L tank, like I bought. They’re relatively cheap, around $500.