Our electric water heater turns ten this month. It has worked flawlessly and still does, but since I've never had a water heater last this long (got 4 years and 7 years out of the previous two) I'm thinking about being proactive and replacing it.
I just finished a self-education course on water heaters after our last one expired at just over six years, a few months after the warranty expired, at an installed cost of $1,200. That got my attention because the one before that lasted ten years, and water heaters where we used to live routinely lasted 20+ years with no attention whatsoever. What changed?
Turns out that what changed is the water where we now live in WV and where we used to live in MD near Washington, D.C. The water here is much harder (more dissolved minerals) and because of that we also run a water softener, which essentially substitutes salt for the dissolved minerals, which in turn makes the water more corrosive.
Enter the
anode rod. All water heaters have them, except those really expensive ones with plastic tanks. What the anode rod does is sacrifice itself to the cathode, which is the steel of the water tank, similar to the zincs in a boat. Depending on the chemistry of your local water supply the anode may need to be replaced as often as once a year, or never, most are somewhere in between. The plumber here said check it after two years. It's cheap maintenance item, the one I bought at Home Depot a couple months ago was $14 & change for a 42" aluminum one. Magnesium ones can also be used if the aluminum one causes a "rotten egg" sulfur smell but they cost twice as much. I doubt $30 is going to bust anyone's budget though.
There are two main hurdles to doing the change yourself. One is that the factories use trained gorillas to install the original ones to make sure they won't leak. This also makes them hard to remove so you'll need either an impact wrench or a cheater bar to lengthen your breaker bar to loosen it. If you use a cheater bar you may need someone to hold the tank still so as not to rotate it and damage the connecting pipes. If one of your friends is a gorilla invite him over for a beer.
The other hurdle is overhead space. Here, the water heater is in an unfinished part of the basement and I have 45" of headroom over the tank to work with so that's not an issue. If yours is in tighter quarters you may have to remove the rod in sections, cutting the old one with a hacksaw as you go, or just bend it (you're not putting it back so that won't matter) or even disconnect everything so you can tilt the heater to one side. To get the new one in they make them in sections connected by links so they'll bend. Sort of like aluminum sausage links. Search for "segmented anode rod".
BTW, it seems the "standard" socket size for the anode rod is 1 1/16. Don't hold me to that though. There are a bunch of "how-to" videos on youtube on how to change the anode rod, I'm figuring 30 to 45 minutes on doing it. To save $1,200 every six years that's worth doing.
Oh, and one other thing I learned. Some much more expensive water heaters have special "extended life" characteristics and are warranted for twelve years instead of only six years like normal water heaters. What that means is that they have two anode rods instead of only one.
If I had natural gas available would switch to tankless.
