Water Heater Repair Depends on What It Burns

Four symptoms cover almost every water heater fault, and each one points somewhere specific. Start with what your heater burns.

Answer first

No hot water, not enough hot water, leaking and rumbling are four different faults with different parts behind them. The first thing to establish is whether the heater is gas or electric, because the two share almost no failure modes at all.

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Start with the fuel

A gas water heater and an electric one are not variations of the same appliance. Gas has a pilot, a thermocouple and a gas valve, and a flue that has to draft. Electric has two elements and two thermostats and nothing that can blow out. Almost no fault is common to both.

We hold the fuel mix for 4,387 towns across 38 states — 2,462 lead on gas, 1,562 on electricity and 363 on fuel oil. Find yours on the coverage page, or read how to tell in ten seconds.

Then the symptom

None at all usually means the burner is not lighting or a cut-out has tripped. Not enough is the more informative complaint — it often names the failed part. Rumbling is steam escaping from under sediment. Water on the floor is the one that will not wait.

One setting worth checking today

The CPSC recommends setting a water heater to 120°F, and the reason is not comfort: 150°F water causes a third-degree burn in two seconds.

Water temperature	Time to a third-degree burn
150°F	2 seconds
140°F	6 seconds
130°F	30 seconds
120°F	5 minutes

Source: US Consumer Product Safety Commission, Tap Water Scalds, publication 5098.

More on the setting, including why it also slows scale and cuts standing loss.

And when not to repair

DOE puts a storage tank's life at 10 to 15 years. Past that, money spent on a repair is often money spent twice, and the part that decides which end of that range you land on is one almost nobody replaces.

Source: US Department of Energy, Which Water Heater Is Right for You?.

Know the fuel and the symptom? That is most of the call.Gas and electric heaters fail in almost entirely different ways, so saying which you have gets you to the right person faster. We route the call and never charge you for it. Water heaters are what we write about; the number goes further.

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