Appliance question from a dummie!

[hyphenate]

I'm really not up to speed on water heaters, so I thought this would be a good crowd to ask.

Where I am living now, in the second floor apartment of a friend's two family house, we have an oil tank which connects to the furnace and which also provides the hot water. So when I'm extra busy cleaning up and use a lot of hot water, it depletes my ability to heat because both functions work off the oil in the tank. Sometimes, to compensate, I will take a big container of water and boil it instead, in order to keep the tank at max. capacity to heat the house.

Taking this into consideration, is there any way to provide myself with more hot water, say, with a small hot water heater in the apartment, connected only to the kitchen sink? And if possible, to have it run from the electricity instead of the oil furnace? OR is there a way to replace the hot water heater in the basement with an electrical one? Or one of those "waterless" water heaters? (Or whatever they call them--I DID say I was a dummie!) I figure not only if I could do this, it would keep the oil strictly for the heat in the winter, and would in the long run save mucho dinero on the water supply, because right now it takes a good while for the water to even get hot coming out of the faucet.

What need I do to get more information, and where do people suggest I go to find out more about possible options?

[hfojvt]

1. a plumbing and heating shop can answer those questions

You can get "point of use" water heaters that heat the water up as you use it, rather than keeping a tank of hot water. I am sure there are electrical water heaters, but to install one would require re-wiring since you cannot just plug them into an outlet. But you need to talk to a place that sells them, and they might have other ideas too.