How to Flush & Vacuum Water Heater Tank to Remove Sediment - [Easy DIY Fix!]

hey what's up guys so if you have a water heater that sounds like this like it's making popcorn then we probably want to get that addressed i'll show you what i do to take care of mine let's just go over a quick list of the bare minimum tools that you're going to need to complete this project you're going to need a five in one tool or a paint scraper a putty knife anything like that that's metal you're going to need channel locks a flathead screwdriver a piece of pex i'll get into how long you need and what size and all of that soon you're going to need a half inch ratchet a 1 in 1 16 inch socket you're going to need a coupling a reducer some thread tape citric acid or white still vinegar either one's fine and i have a 2 gallon wet dry shop vac you're also going to need a garden hose a sacrificial hose and you're going to cut it right down the middle just right in half so that you'll have two lengths one with a female end one with a male end okay first things first i'm going to turn this off there we go then i'm going to turn off the gas valve i'm going to turn off the cold water coming in so the next step what you're going to want to do is since i have a gas heater i'm going to remove this shoot here get this out of the way because i need to access the anode rod back here and we're gonna have to get that taken taken out next all right with that shoot gone you're gonna want to take a uh at least with mine it's a 1 and 1 16 inch socket with a ratchet use a half inch ratchet you want the beefiest one you can get i recommend using a socket like this so you can see the inside of it versus one of these this one will strip especially if this is the first time you've ever done it and you've never taken this off the calcium buildup and everything you have on this this is going to be stuck big times you're also probably going to need a cheater pipe so some steel pipe that goes on the end of this that gives you more leverage so your arm will be out here more um and um if it's never been taken out there's a good chance that this is just going to twist the entire tank is going to twist while you're trying to do it and you're not going to get any or enough torque on this to break the bond what i had to do you can kind of see the marks here i had to put a ratchet strap all the way around under this obviously between here but a ratchet strap i put a foam like stadium cushion here and then one on the back and i cinched this down with the ratchet lock right here as tight as i could i then ran a flat board against this wall and then i took another board like a two by four piece that ran against um this flat board against the wall over to the ratchet um locking mechanism here um and i got that really tight in there so that it was not moving on its own that way when i pulled on this and tried to go counter-clockwise trying to twist the whole thing this way this tank couldn't spin because of the board that was pushing up against the wall that's what i ultimately had to do and i had a cheater pipe all the way standing out here my arm out here in order to break this for the first time i now do this process yearly so it's not that big of a deal but that was my horror story let's get on to the next step of removing the anode rod all right that was relatively easy since i do this once a year um you're also going to want to open up a hot water line like at your sink or whatnot and that'll help with some of the pressure here because once you start cracking this water starts um going out and from here if you have calcium carbonate like i do this anode rod is supposed to be sacrificial and it's supposed to get eaten away um but i've had this same rod for a long time because the calcium carbonate just sticks to it and the rod doesn't actually deteriorate and i have a collapsible one which if you have limited space you don't want like a four foot rod in here because you can't get it out and you can't tip the tank over so do yourself a favor get a collapsible one pull this out look at all that calcium carb all of that that's all sitting on the bottom of your tank we got to get that taken care of all right let's get to the next step now we need to go to the spigot at the bottom and see if we have any water flow if you have a lot of calcium buildup there's a good chance this water is not going to flow out very easily at all you might get just a trickle hopefully i'll luck out here because we need to drain the tank and that's good enough for me so what i'm going to do is turn this off here and i'm going to hook up a hose and i'm going to drain this out onto my driveway now if you find that yours is not draining water out you basically got two choices the first one is to take a piece of wire and to just back feed it inside of here so obviously open this up with a screwdriver or whatever tool you need on yours to open the spigot run a wire like a stiff wire that can bend a little bit up through there to break up the calcium that's blocking it from the water from getting out other than that if it keeps consistently getting blocked by silt or small calcium chunks you can also tediously drain this into a small bucket and have a short piece of hose you know a foot long or what not just have the um female end here attached and you can blow back into the hose with your mouth and blow the calcium out and then water will flow for a while and it might plug back up and you can keep doing that process but those are two ways of getting around that i have the hose hooked up now it is draining outside and as you can see here outside we are getting a ring of calcium building up now while that's draining let's talk about this anode rod really quick like i said i recommend a one of these collapsible ones they're just easier all around um these are supposed to deteriorate instead of the lining of the tank i believe and um if you have calcium carbonate in your water you're not going to have any deterioration it's just going to coat the rod itself so i just take a one of those like five in one scraper tools scrape all the calcium off of this and it'll reveal the magnesium underneath okay now that all of the water is drained out i had tilted the water heater towards myself to allow any remaining water to drain what i'm going to do is take a pipe wrench and i'm going to break the seal with the tank here and i'm going to leave the hose on because i want to protect the threads because i've ruined this one time by having the hose off and this slipped and the steel of this is harder than the brass of this and it will ruin the threads so you don't want to do that so leave this on just until you crack it once you do you can take the hose off and unthread it the rest of the way and if you listen closely you can hear a little tick tick tick that's actually even though my cold water valve is turned off it has a leak i don't know if that's because of the calcium buildup as well but never trust that when this is off that this the water is going to be completely stopped from going inside of the tank the first time i tried cleaning this what i did was i drained um almost all the water and i filled this thing with about 10 gallons of vinegar and i went on vacation for 10 days i left the anode rod out and i expected to come back and have everything dissolved that tick tick tick tick that filled up over 10 days and i came back home to a flooded basement because everything that overflowed went right down in here all right the next step once that is completely drained out go ahead and close the spigot again you can leave the hose connected for now and then we're going to add some sort of an acid i recommend citric acid but you can use vinegar as well pour a couple gallons of vinegar inside use a funnel to make sure you don't splash vinegar everywhere or you can add some of this uh the latest concoction i've been doing is basically like um two gallons of water and you know six cups of this or something it turns into like a carbonated mess inside which is great the carbon dioxide just shows that it's reacting and then i let it sit for about eight hours so i try to do all of this in the morning and then go to work and then come back basically all it's going to do is soften some stuff up loosen it a little bit make it a little more brittle the calcium inside but it's by no means going to dissolve all of your calcium so don't get that idea you're going to have to leave this for days to accomplish that task all right now after the eight hours has gone by um i don't like to put too much in because i don't want to empty a lot of it but what i'm going to do is i'm going to drain it out through the spigot and just fill a bucket and dump that in the drain with the spigot removed you can now see that all of this is calcium it's like calcium chips everywhere and that's what's causing all of that popping sound so the steam bubbles are trying to get up and when they have they build up pressure when they're under there and when they're finally released they make that popping noise so we have to get all of that crud out and we're gonna start with the vacuum now i have a two gallon wet dry shop vac and what i did is i took the hose with me to home depot and i tried finding some sort of attachment that i could make to be able to vacuum the inside of the water heater and what i ended up finding was this uh coupling here and this fits perfectly there i mean it is tight perfectly inside the hose of the vacuum and then this reducer here which uh drops it down to a half inch put that in the end and that works perfect with this pex water line here and that is a perfect fit that goes right in there so i basically got a reduced vacuum hose with the end of this the pecs i end up bending it kinking it lightly in certain areas to give it this curve and what that allows me to do once um once i have the spigot out is i can then feed this inside of the water tank and kind of drop down in to the edges where i want to get the bottom of my tank i'm assuming it might be the same with yours is dome shaped so it's like this and all of the sediment will fill around the perimeter so you need something that gets around and sucks around the edges uh if you hear your vacuum change pitch that means that this is blocked and you're gonna have to clear this out so it's gonna be one of those tedious processes where you put it in there you get as much as you can and then you clear out the little uh pex tubing and you just keep going once you've got about as much as you think you can get what i then do is i take the other half of that hose that we cut that we didn't talk about um so the end that we had on here is the female end that attaches we take the male end now that the spigot is out and we put the male end in here and on mine it can only twist in like an eighth of a turn or whatnot but that's enough to get it to hold and stay we then take the end that was on here and we go out to our um spigot outside for like our garden we attach that up we run the line from the spigot outside back through the top where the anode rod was so it'll feed down in that hole and then we um turn on the hose outside and on full blast and then from up top we just swirl the hose around the best we can to spray the edges the best that we can and what that's going to do is just agitate all of that calcium and it's going to flow out the hose that we have connected here and we don't want to have the spigot here because this only lets a small amount of water through we want uh you're gonna have calcium chunks and whatnot so you're gonna want the whole the whole hose so that as much calcium can get through as possible and not get restricted by this so all of that calcium that's getting agitated by the water up top splashing down is gonna flow out um outside and you're gonna be able to see calcium just piling up outside wherever you're draining it you will do this process for as long as you keep seeing calcium flow out so keep going outside repeatedly take note of what the calcium pile looks like take a look at the chunks of calcium that are going out if you keep agitating the water and you notice that nothing new is coming out that pile is not growing anymore that means that water is still getting out but you've got some serious blockage here and nothing's being allowed out basically so what you're going to have to do is turn off the garden hose outside come back inside let it all drain when it's done draining outside from the water that you've added and agitated with you then repeat the process you remove the hose and then you take your shop vac you vacuum up whatever calcium chunks are blocking it you clear the blockage in the hose usually there's not much is just right at the very end and then you do the same thing with the pex tubing you put it back in vacuum out as much as you can and when you're happy with how much you got out you repeat the process you connect the hose back up you turn the water on outside you agitate as much as you can and get as much calcium out you just lather rinse and repeat it's that simple guys i do this about once every six months because i refuse to get a water softener and i just am too lazy to put it in right now but i do it basically first thing after the snow melts and then i do it right before winter as well so about once every six months not a big deal um you can skip if you want the vinegar or citric acid process if you want and just get right to the vacuuming that's completely up to you it might be all in my head that it actually softens things up but that's just the procedure i've been doing this whole time all right and as you guys can see this is the results from yesterday's cleaning this is the stuff that had flooded out there was even more over here at one point we had a good rainstorm and wash a lot of stuff away but you can see the calcium chunks and chips that are down here the longer the calcium stays there i think it turns this yellow and just it's hard but you can break it or it's just this white powdery substance and then the shop vac itself filled this up quite a bit i mean this is all all thick calcium that was at the bottom of the water heater now why it causes the the popping sound i believe it's just like when you boil a pot of water you get the bubbles that start at those little points at the bottom of the pot and they try to rise up well when you've got pounds and pounds of this heavy thick calcium just weighing on top of it you increase the pressures and i think it's the bubbles basically just releasing and able to escape and get out it causes that popping sound and they're breaking up the chunks of calcium and things like that so anyways i hope this video helps you out guys and uh if you got that popping sound it's not that big of a chore if you skip the uh vinegar step um you can get this done in just a couple hours and be done with it i did about i'd say five or six passes with vacuuming on mine and that's how much calcium i was able to get out of it and all of that flushed out as well so um if this helped you out feel free to give me a like and subscribe and i appreciate your view take it easy guys

Channel: Home Battery Bank

Views: 74,345

Keywords: water heater, popping, sound, noise, rumbling, popping sound, popcorn, diy, how to fix, fix, how to, without plumber, do i need to replace, vacuum out water heater, vacuum, flush, flush water heater, calcium, sediment, minerals, hot water, tank, gas, propane, clean out, clean out water heater, hot water tank, save money, fix yourself, do it yourself, normal, water heater making noise, Rheem, Rheem water heater

Id: hB1F_T7ZmxM

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021