Video: Maintaining Your Water Heater

SAN RAFAEL — Sarah Rutan: Whether you have a traditional or tankless water heater, annual maintenance is crucial to ensure efficient operation. Today we’re in San Rafael with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Kyle Barnhart of Mike Testa Plumbing to learn more.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Kyle Barnhart: All right, so when I go to a customer’s house to deal with water heater issues, whether it’s replacement or troubleshooting, even if it’s not working properly, one of the questions that I ask them is, when was the last time that they performed routine maintenance on their water heater, and almost always the answer is, they have never done so. And doing routine maintenance on your water heater is an important part of keeping your water heater working efficiently and lasting as long as it possibly can.

As far as water heaters are concerned, there are two different types: there are tank types and tankless water heaters, and both have routine maintenance needs. The tankless water heaters require a yearly flushing with a descaling solution to make sure that the heat exchanger stays full flowing, not being blocked by any sort of sediment or mineral build-up. It also has a number of air and water filters that need to be cleaned out so that it can get all of its combustion air, and water can move through the unit appropriately.

As far as the tank water heater is concerned, the maintenance on that is much more basic. It essentially just needs to be turned off and drained out 100 percent to flush out any sediment or debris that builds up on the bottom of the tank. If you don’t do this service, that sediment builds up and then your water heater is trying to heat your water through all of this sediment. It causes your water heater to work harder, and it makes it less efficient.

And this is actually a service that most homeowners can do themselves. You’ll notice at the bottom of most water heaters, or perhaps behind a little access panel, is a hose bib connection. And so what you would do is you just attach a garden hose to that, roll your hose outside. At the top of the water heater should be a gate valve or a ball valve to turn the water off to the water heater, and then on the gas control valve there’s a little knob. You just turn that to “pilot,” and then you open up the drain valve, let your unit drain all of the water out. Once it’s finished draining, you close the drain valve, you open up the water valve on top and let the tank fill to capacity. And then once it’s completely full, you just turn your gas control valve back to “on.” It should automatically turn on to start heating your water.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local, top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.