Just a Frinedly Reminder to Drain Your Hot Water Heater

Rumor has it, that you should drain your water heater and flush it once a year or every other year. This gets rid of all the sediment that settles in the bottom of the water heater. Too much sediment can cause premature failure of the water heater and they aren’t very cheap to replace.

I’ve been thinking about draining mine for a a few years but I’ve just never done it. The whole, “I will do it later” thing really gets me sometimes.

With my garage basically gutted to make room for my Son’s Subaru project, I decided to finally do it.

*Turn off Cold water supply
*Set thermostat to “Pilot” (natural gas water heater)
*open a faucet in the house
*open the pressure relief valve
*connect a hose and open valve to drain

It took about 1/2 hour to drain and I didn’t find much sediment. So I closed the hose valve, the faucet, and the pressure relief valve and filled the tank up. Then I drained it again. Doing this stirred up all the sediment on the bottom of the tank. That was frikken nasty!! I did this 2 more times before the water I drained out didn’t have any visual sediment in the jug. Granted there may have been some but I couldn’t see it with my naked eye.

I had the hose in the gutter at the street and I was amazed at how much sediment was piling up around the hose. I was blown away at how much sediment was sitting in the bottom of my hot water heater. NASTY!!!

So yeah, a friendly reminder to drain that bad boy once in a while.