there is an excellent reason for draining your hot water heater once a year...

[fairfarmhand]

If you don't

YOU'LL BE SORRRRYYYY!!!!! (ask me how I know this....)

 

 

 

The Heating Element went out Sunday night and we came home to find hot water all over our garage from where the water heater overheated. In order to replace the element dh had to drain the tank. Since we've not drained it since we moved in (9 years) the sediment in the bottom clogged the drain. It took almost all day to simply drain the tank. We poked, prodded, and now we're soaking the stupid thing in vinegar to get out the last of it.

 

I can't wait till we can put in a tankless heater...

[shalom22]

I was just thinking about get this done this morning. Guess I better make it a priority.

 

Thanks for the reminder.

[Brilliant]

Thank you! We have very hard water and I'm constantly cleaning faucets with vinegar; using bottled water in my Keurig, etc. I hadn't even though about what it might be doing to the hot water heater. Another project for hubby. :)

[Carrie12345]

Yikes! I've never even thought about that before (and we have hard water). My hwh is right smack in the middle of my house, too. :glare:

[*********]

LA LA LA, I can't heeeeeeeeeeear you....

 

(This is me, dancing around in a circle of denial with my fingers in my ears. 'Cause we have two, yes TWO hot water heaters in our house-of-crazy-construction, and I'm doubting either of them have EVER been drained.)

[cjzimmer1]

Since this is the first I've ever heard of it, you can tell just how often we have done it. So how might one go about doing this? It in our basement which is completely finished except for the room it sits in. There is a drain there. Does one just turn a knob and let it drain out? It amazes me the number of household things there are to do around a house that I have zero knowledge of. I'm always asking my neighbor about how to do different outside tasks because I seriously have no clue how to maintain things inside or outside of a house. My dad never thought it was important to teach girls any of this stuff and my FIL simply never taught my hubby anything that didn't involve computers.

[fairfarmhand]

ok. I'll initiate you folks...

 

1. if you have hard water and have never done this, be prepared to devote an entire day to this project. It took us all day to drain it.

 

2. turn off the breaker at the box to the hwh. Wait for awhile, take a shower so you don't waste all that water. Give everyone a bath in the house, till you're pretty sure all the hot water is out of the tank This is so you don't scald yourself.

 

3. Turn off the water valve that leads to the tank. This will cut off the water supply to the tank so it isn't refilling while you are draining.

 

4. hook a non-leaking garden hose to the faucet at the bottom. If your hwh is like mine it has a cheap pathetic plastic faucet. BE CAREFUL! you can crack or break that thing and you'll end up with 50 gallons of water in the floor.

 

5. open the faucet.

 

6. if the faucet does not drain, or is only a trickle, unhook the hose and slide a shallow baking pan under it. (have a large bucket nearby)

 

7. insert a slim wire or bottle brush up into the drain. This is to agitate the sediment and unclog it. Water will drip out and fill the pan, as will chunks of nasty gunk. (yep...that's what's in your water!) empty the pan into the bucket as needed. If it's as bad as mine, this part will take several hours of you hunching over the faucet, jiggling a wire in the drain.

 

8. This took us hours to do. When the water coming from the tank no longer has sediment in it, you are done.

 

http://www.ehow.com/how_4843667_heavy-sediment-out-water-heater.html

 

good luck folks. This was a pain in the patootie, but since my dh replaced just about everything in the thing (since we don't want to go through this for a good long while) hopefully we don't have to do it again for a long time. We are going to begin to drain it every now and then!

[KathyBC]

DH did all this after the heating elements quit, right down to emptying the sediment with a teaspoon. Only to have the thermostat quit about six weeks later. That was exciting - it was like a gigantic tea kettle. By the time we did the elements and thermostat... we ended up deciding to just put in a new tank. :auto:

[plansrme]

I can't wait till we can put in a tankless heater...

 

Can I just tell you some things that we learned about our tankless AFTER it was installed?

1. The maximum temperature is 120 unless you get a commercial-grade model. This feels very nanny-state to me, and I do not like not having the option to crank it up if I want to.

2. While mine is gas, it has an electric switch or control panel. Accordingly, when the electricity is out, we will immediately have no hot water. Even with an electric hot water heater, you would have had the residual hot water in the tank.

3. While there is no tank inside my basement utility closet where no one can see it, there is a big 'ole SILVER contraption on the outside of my WHITE house, right by the back door where everyone enters my home.

 

I would not do it again, and mine is only a week old.

 

Terri

[lisamarie]

So if you drain your HWH annually, do you still have to go through that whole long process? I thought you just had to hook the hose up to it, turn the dial and let it drain until you no longer get any sludge. Is that not enough? We've never done a full drain, just the bottom of the barrel drain.

[fairfarmhand]

So if you drain your HWH annually, do you still have to go through that whole long process? I thought you just had to hook the hose up to it, turn the dial and let it drain until you no longer get any sludge. Is that not enough? We've never done a full drain, just the bottom of the barrel drain.

 

 

if you did it annually, it wouldn't be such a big deal (hopefully). I would think that it would be enough. The major issue with ours was that there was SO much sediment that the drain would not really runl it would be clogged.

[fairfarmhand]

DH did all this after the heating elements quit, right down to emptying the sediment with a teaspoon. Only to have the thermostat quit about six weeks later. That was exciting - it was like a gigantic tea kettle. By the time we did the elements and thermostat... we ended up deciding to just put in a new tank. :auto:

 

 

This is exactly why my dh replaced EVERYTHING that could be replaced. Today he is going to find a METAL drain fixture and replace that flimsy plastic thing.

 

And he also emptied the sediment with a long spoon type thingy that we fashioned out of an odd piece of plastic tubing.

 

:) (smilie put in by request of my 8 year old)

 

(and we ended up with the giant Tea Kettle effect as well. EXCITEMENT!)