Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink! You might not drink water from your water heater, but you sure don’t want to see water everywhere, especially if it’s coming from the nozzle of your water heater. There are a lot of gallons of water contained in that hot water tank of yours, so a small mistake when trying to flush the system could lead to a pretty major leak and some issues down the line.
Look, we’re not here to stop anyone from learning about their water heaters in Mason, OH. In fact, we’d love to talk you through the process of flushing a water heater. The important thing is that we want homeowners to save money and defer to experts when professional services are required, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about when we discuss water heater flushing.
Let’s talk about why yearly water heater flushing is important, and why you should defer to an expert.
Getting Rid of Sediment Build-Up
First, we need to talk about why a homeowner might flush their water heater. By flush, we mean remove all of the water in the system, drain it, and allow it to refill again with fresh water. This is actually an important step in the maintenance of your water heater, because it removes sediment buildup.
Over time, minerals like calcium will form on the bottom of your water heater. These minerals are safe to drink and they’re fine to have in freshwater, but they’re bad for your plumbing equipment. They’ll quickly reduce the heating capacity of your water heater and stop it from filling up with enough water to provide your basic hot water needs.
If you flush your water heater every year, you can essentially drain the minerals from the system before they get solidified to a degree where they’re hard to remove.
How to Flush Your Water Heater
Flushing your water heater is complicated, but essentially it’s a three-step process.
- First, the water heater needs to be turned off and the cold water intake valve needs to be shut off. This ensures no water enters the tank.
- Then, after the water in the tank cools, it needs to be drained through a hose from the valve on the side of the tank.
- Eventually, this will drain all of the water in the tank, and it should be turned back on.
This might seem simple, but you could deal with a lot of leaking water and mold problems if the water isn’t properly flushed. Think about it, there are many gallons of water in that tank and they’ll all exit through the valve if you’re not careful with how you flush your system. That’s why we recommend letting a professional handle it.
We Can Do It!
Water heater flushing is an essential step in our routine maintenance visit. We can do it while we check the diagnostics of your system and make adjustments for efficiency. Instead of doing this step yourself, why not call our team to have this essential maintenance done at the same time as a water heater inspection?
Contact Ken Neyer Plumbing, Inc. for reliable water heater services like maintenance.