How to Flush a Water Heater - Step by Step

hey guys Jay here with word of advice TV and today I need to flush my water heater and I thought I might as well make a video of how I do it now this is just how I drain and flush my water heater some people might do it a little differently but for the most part it's gonna be the same so of course first of all you just need to hook up your garden hose to the drain valve which is typically going to be not typically always going to be on the bottom of your water heater you got the burner chamber right here which is about this big I don't know three four inches and then on the bottom of the actual water storage tank you're gonna have a drain valve lots of times it'll be in the front if it's not just look around and you should find it you know either the left or the right side somewhere there so you hook up your hose to the drain valve and there's different kinds of drain valves some of them will be twist open if they're plastic it could just be a tube with like a plastic wheel that you spin to open it up others will have a little ball valve or a lever to open it maybe a spigot just that round wheel spigot or like in my case you just need a flathead screwdriver to open up the valve like this but before you start draining the water heater and flushing it there is a couple other things you have to do first of all if you have a gas water heater turn down your temperature setting all the way up to pilot lighting or vacation setting if you have that you can completely turn it off if you want by turning your knob off here's the pilot setting in mine and if I twist it further might as well that'll turn it off all the way the downside of turning it off instead of just leaving it on pilot or vacation setting or pilot lighting like a mine right here is that when you switch it to the off position then you have to relight your water heater but if you leave it in the pilot then you can just turn your water heater right back on and the burners will come on that was a mouthful so let me repeat it just one more time quickly basically you're putting it to pilot lighting or vacation setting and then you switch your gas knob to the pilot setting like this the reason for that is while you're draining the water heater from all the water you do not want your burner to come on and heat an empty tank because that can damage the thing so if you have a gas water heater this is what you would do if you have an electrical water heater then you would go to your breaker panel and find where your water heater or circuit breaker is usually it'll be a 220 double polled breaker and shut that off so the elements don't come on while you're draining the water heater so you turn the thermostat or at a gas valve to the pilot setting and other than that you also have to turn off your cold water supply on top of the water so you'll have two pipes coming out from the top of your water heater if you're not sure which one is your cold water and which one's your hot you could just try grabbing them right on top and of course the one that's the hot side is gonna be hot whereas the cold side is going to be cold if you just travel a little upwards like right here I can feel that it's nice and cold up on top whereas this one is still hot up in here and of course if you have a water heater that's something like mine I have these rings on top that kind of give it away red of course means hot and blue means cold I'd have to make it even easier it's even inscribed on top of it too so it's hot on this side and cold on this side most water heaters will have that and here's my anode rod right here I need to replace that sometime soon too so once you've followed your cold water supply which in my case is this one that one should have a water shut-off valve right above it in my case it's a ball valve that I just turned perpendicular to the pipe to make like an X or a plus sign and that shuts the water off to the water heater sometimes it might be a little spigot wheel type valve too and just the warning if you get unlucky when you start messing with this you might spring a little bit of a leak so hopefully that won't happen to you but just kind of a heads up alright and now we are ready to drain and flush our water heater I already have my hose hooked up I just need to run it to my floor drain if you can run your hose outside that's even better if you can't that's fine and just one more note about this the water coming out of your water heater is probably going to be very hot so make sure nobody's touching it your dogs not trying to drink it and stuff like that in my case the outside is pretty far and it's really cold outside anyway so I'm just gonna route this to my floor drain which is right under my laundry sink right here so I'll just put that there and I also have a bucket what I'm gonna just start draining it I want to put the hose in here and just see what kind of junk comes out of the water heater there should be some build-up and sediment that comes out of there and one last thing you do before you open up that drain valve and start draining the water heater is you wanna open up the hot side of some kind of faucet preferably on the same level as your water heater turn on the hot side just leave it fully open and if you have nothing leaking by that water shut-off valve on top of that cold water supply your water should completely stop or just be a very small drip or trickle anyways you just open up the hot side and you leave it open and then for now I will just stick my hose into the bucket so we can see what comes out of here and let's go open up that valve and the reason I'm doing this is because water heater is really according to the manufacturer should be flushed every year or two and I haven't flushed mine for two years now actually I bought this house two years ago the water heaters 2003 so that's about 16 years old now I'm not sure if the previous owner ever flushed it and you know what even if he didn't a lot of times that'll be just fine I've seen water heaters that are like thirty years old that I've never been flushed so I mean it's good maintenance but not everybody does it really it's up to you if you want to do it or not but it's pretty simple to do okay so I got my gas valve turned to the pilot setting my shutoff on the water supply is off and my hot water faucet is open now we're ready to just open up this valve so I would just completely go counterclockwise until it stops to fully open this valve so as you can see there is some sediment on the bottom there it's a lot less than I expected it would be there you go I'll stir it up so it's a dust cloud but that's pretty normal because most of that sediment is gonna be at the bottom of the tank right now we're just draining it the actual washing part where we stir stuff up that'll be a little bit later so I don't think we need the bucket anymore I'll just go ahead and put the holes right here let it drain dump this out after even better I'll just dump it in the sink and this usually takes about 20 minutes to drain and the reason we opened up our hot water faucet is so we don't have that upside down gallon effect or a straw Fecteau some people like to call it you know when you dump on water of gallon upside-down the water just kind of chugs out of there slowly instead of pouring out so if you don't open up a hot water faucet you create a similar effect with your water heater where it'll be just chugging out slower I apologize for my nasty looking floor drain but it is metal and it started rusting as you can see but this draining process will take probably around 20 minutes so I'm gonna go ahead and just put this hose right here and let it drain and we'll come back once it's done and we're back I was a little optimistic when I said 20 minutes it's more like 30 or 40 minutes that it took for this whole thing to drain and maybe like three or five minutes after it started draining I also pulled this pressure or leaf valve to release the pressure as well and help it drain faster so I had that open all the time too so the water heater is completely drained now and at this point this is where the flushing part comes in so if there's any kind of sediment buildup on the bottom of the tank this should stir it up and get it out so I open my cold water supply at this point I leave the hot water faucet open and I can leave my pressure relief file open as well and I just open up this cold water supply for maybe 20 seconds at a time and then I'm also gonna go ahead and put this hose back in the bucket see what kind of stuff we can start up and get to come out as you can see I had some scale or sediment that came out and this might just be because I have the holes elevated but surprisingly it's actually not that much stuff coming out I thought it would be a lot more so the previous owner must have actually been flushing his water heater so there's not that much stuff in there so I opened the cold supply valve and I let it fill up for maybe 20 seconds just so the water comes rushing down and stir up some of that stuff on the bottom of the tank I left it open for about 20 seconds then I closed that valve back up wait for the water heater to drain out open it back up again for about 20 seconds and I repeat that process maybe four or five times to make sure I stir up everything and get most of that stuff out of there and then my third time flushing it I noticed that there was no water coming out of the hose even though the thing was filling for like 30 seconds already which means that some kind of a big flake or a big piece of debris was plugging up the valve so I took off the hose and just blew through it backwards and you know a bunch of gunk came flying out I had a little puddle here I didn't film that but I already mopped it up but yeah if you're not noticing any water coming out of your hose that means something is plugging up that valve from the inside there okay so I'm done pushing my water heater at this point you want to close your drain valve you want to tighten it pretty snug otherwise they might start leaking and you can take that hose off and I would watch it for a little bit to make sure it's not leaking once in a while after you disturb this valve it will start to leak and it won't stop you can try tightening it a little harder and most of the time that'll be enough to stop it if it doesn't then you pretty much have a leaking valve and your options are either replace the drain valve or you could just go to a hardware store and buy yourself a little cap like this with the seal inside and just go ahead and cap this drain that off and that of course will stop the leak real quick so we took off the hose next thing you want to do is turn your water supply back on and just let your water heater completely fill so you want to leave that hot water faucet open I usually just leave it open the whole time all the way up until it goes to the top the pressure relief valve you can leave open until you see some water coming out or you can just leave it open for out at all I don't want to put a time limit on but you can kind of hear the water filling up usually city pressure is about 60 psi so the water heater fills up pretty quickly so I typically just leave the hot water faucet on and go ahead and close that pressure relief valve and as you can hear it my hot water faucet is starting to see out a bunch of air that's because as that water is filling up the tank the air is getting purged out of this faucet so you definitely want to leave a faucet open until your water heater fills up well as you can see my water started to pour it only took it like three minutes to fill back up compared to like 35 minutes of drain so it fills back up real quick and you might see some air bubbles spreading out of there that's normal so you turn your water on you close your pressure relief valve the tank completely filled up and the last thing you do is either relight your water heater if you completely turn it off or set it from pilot backed on and set your temperature setting back up to where you have it and you should be good to go well guys and that is how I drain and flush my water heater hopefully you found this video useful if you have some suggestions of how I can make this process go even smoother please share with us in the comments below I would much appreciate it thank you so much for watching this video don't forget to mash that like button on the way out and we'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Applause]

Channel: Word of Advice TV

Views: 1,242,333

Keywords: how to flush a water heater, how to drain a water heater, how to flush a gas water heater, how to flush hot water heater, how to flush electric water heater, flush water heater, how to drain gas water heater, how to clean out sediment in water heater, flush hot water heater, word of advice tv, how to flush your water heater, flushing your water heater, flushing a water heater, draining water heater, drain water heater, flushing water heater, water heater flush

Id: Fe-vjR1h1yw

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019