Holy fuck that seems like a tedious, difficult, messy job. I’ve also never heard of it, and I feel like the homeowners I know would have bitched about it to me before if they had to do it. I looked it up, and there’s all sorts of scenarios in which they might not have to do that (anode rods and tankless water heaters both seem pretty cool and there are services for it), but I might just send out a couple of texts. Water heaters are nothing to fuck with.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It’s tedious, but it’s mostly just a matter of waiting for the water to heat back up afterwards.

Unplug the heater, then run the bathtub until you’re out of hot water. Turn off the bathtub, and turn off the water supply going into the heater. Attach a garden hose to the bottom of the heater, and run it to a drain somewhere. Turn the hot water on somewhere like a sink, to provide a vent to the system; It won’t run because the supply is turned off, but it’ll at least allow air into the system for when you drain the heater. Use the spigot at the bottom of the heater to drain it.

Be prepared for a gross rush of water at first, because all of the sediment and rust will have settled to the bottom of the heater where the spigot is. Once it’s drained, you can do whatever maintenance you need. For instance, you probably need to replace the cathode rod, which is designed to wear away over time to protect the rest of the heater from corrosion.

To do a final flush, you can open the water inlet at the top of the tank. It’ll help drain any last remaining sediment out of the tank. Then turn off the water inlet, turn off the spigot, disconnect the hose, and leave the sink tap open while you refill the tank with fresh water.

The whole process only takes like 30 minutes, and then you’re just waiting for the heater to come back up to temperature afterwards.

[–] MutilationWave 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Wow thanks for the info. My heater tank just shit the bed a month ago, flooding water all over my unfinished cave of a basement. I rent this place, so all in all for me it was great. My landlord replaced it with a pretty decent and bigger tank, the plumber replaced a lot of our 100 year old pipes with new brass, so now my wife and I can do showers back to back in the winter with hot water.

Hopefully we'll become homeowners in 2025 so I'm saving this for the future.

Edit: I forgot! We had nuts water pressure before,125 psi, but the plumber said he had to put a limiter on by law. Probably will save us a bit of money.