Installing a Rheem Hybrid Electric Water Heater

welcome back so we're gonna be doing something a little bit different today i'm at my mom's house so a little bit of a field trip and we'll be changing out her water heater this is an old rude uh i don't know the exact year on it let's see maybe is it in the serial number i don't know it's 1101 it's probably either 2011 or 2001 probably 2001 from the looks of it um it's in looks like maybe a homemade drain pan down here i'm starting to see signs of moisture at the bottom a couple weeks ago i came over here and looked a little dark right about there get you guys a little closer kind of in this area here i stuck a paper towel under and it came back wet there shouldn't really be any water under this water heater under any circumstances so i'm just going to replace it under the assumption that it's leaking and based upon its age as well i mean why mess around with this it's this old right so we're going to be doing something a little bit different because i'm not putting in a water heater like this i'm putting in something different so i've decided to try some new technology vicariously through my mother this is a rheem hybrid electric water heater so this is essentially an air conditioner that runs in reverse it takes the heat from the surroundings on garage in this case and puts it into the water and rewards you with cool air out the side so it's going to have a bit of an air conditioning effect we're in south florida here it's hot it's march believe it or not it's still hot so i'm sure some some cool air will be welcome here so the first step to doing this is to drain that little bad boy there so to do that i normally keep around a section of garden hose yeah it doesn't be fancy some old garden hose fragments you have around and i'll just drain it out down the driveway seriously they were really thoughtful when they built this house because that drain pan has a hole in the back and it actually works water drains out of it so i just cracked look we've got some condensation sorry guys hang on so i cracked the valve on the water heater down there i ran the hose all the way back there and i'll show you where it's draining out there we got a couple of pipes right there come on focus there we go so we got a working drain that's awesome so rare down here water there i just wanted to see where it went i want to make sure one it was clear and two um i want to know where it came out i just want to make sure it wasn't just a hole in the ground so we have a working drain that's perfect so now i'm going to set up some pipe and just like i said run this down the driveway [Applause] so there's still water to the water heater i just want to clear out the bottom of the tank because sometimes if you let it drain under gravity there's a lot of crap in the tank the drain gets clogged it doesn't appear to be happening here that we got some crap coming out but not a whole lot definitely some sediment in there i'll let that run for a minute okay i'm done letting the water run out now it's time to shut the water off the water heater i'm gonna just turn this globe valve and hope it works probably doesn't they never seem to this one feels really crusty let's see what happens crack this open again just opening the valve at the bottom maybe it does work my last sigh of relief now i'm going to open thermal pressure relief valve just let some water in there so air behind water should drain faster that way now it's just a waiting game this takes forever drains about that fast super super slowly a lot of junk coming out though i didn't mention this before but i will now if you're saving this water here you're just taking it out to move it or get something behind it you want to shut the power off first obviously because the main reason for that is if the water level inside the water gets below the elements you'll burn the elements out instantly so we know we have power here i think we do so let's kill the breaker that is labeled water heater and confirm it is now dead so it should be a double pole 30 in the panel i've killed one of the two double pole 30s let's see if we still have juice we do fantastic let's try the next one let's try that one i think she's dead now no nobody's home let's talk about a couple things while waiting for this thing to drain some jurisdictions uh have what they call backflow prevention meaning that there's a check valve in the main water line coming in from the city and that check valve prevents water from flowing backwards into the city piping system now what does that mean if you have backflow prevention and you have one of those check valves what can happen is as the water in the water heater heats up it expands ever so slightly and you probably remember from physics class that you can't compress a fluid right but a fluid will expand slightly as it heats up so if you have that check valve in the city in the city piping system where's all that pressure going to go as that thing heats up right so as this water heats up it's going to expand ever so slightly but you have that check valve that's preventing any water from going back to the city now if you have backflow prevention in your in your house you want to install what's called an expansion tank which is basically just like um a small tank maybe two gallons or so that has a uh a diaphragm in there and uh air on the other side so it gives a kind of like a buffer for the water to expand into i know that this house does not have or this community's too old to have backflow prevention so i'm not going to bother with that but again just check your local codes and do some research before you just blindly do this another thing you'll notice that there is a shutoff valve only on the cold side over here i think that's how they're supposed to be done but that's not how like i like to do them i like to put a valve on both the hot and the cold side now if you think about what i just said about water expanding when it heats up you could create a bomb there someone could inadvertently close both valves with the water heater on and now you're relying on this thermal pressure relief off here to keep the tank from exploding so one way to mitigate that is i still put the valve on both sides but i'll take the handle off of the one on the hot side this way some some idiot that doesn't know what they're doing can't shut that and cause a problem so i'll leave the handle near the water heater but someone has to make an explicit decision to to actuate that handle that still gives you the flexibility to remove the water heater and uh completely isolated from the plumbing system in the house and you may say okay well how why do you need one on the hot side well if you have one of those single handle faucets or that could be a shower faucet could be a sink faucet water will come out the hot side trust me i've seen it happen you can shut off the cold disconnect the water heater leave an open pipe on the hot side actually at one of those single handle faucets i guarantee you water will shut shoot out of there and if you have that ball valve there that just prevents that from happening so we are going to shut the water off to the building before we remove the water heater now just common sense maybe it's not maybe it is i don't know before you shut the water off i like to fill a bucket with water i use the bucket of water when i'm soldering to cool off joints to clean things so have that bucket ready before you shut the water off to the house you don't have to worry about it later so let's just continue to wait let's start unhooking things in the meantime let's start with the electrical let's confirm it's once again dead if you guys need links to any of these tools i'll leave links in the description so we are dead and we are safe so there's an electrical box on the top here just undoing the screws for that i'm not sure if i'm going to reuse this electrical wiring or not yet i might replace it at a later date it's easy to do i'm gonna win this their electrical surface angle aside from it now it's time to get all the tech into the water here's the way to empty ready to go grab a couple winches so so friends okay the water heater finally stopped draining and while it was draining i decided to tackle redoing this drain line here on my mom's ac only because it goes behind the hot water heater and now it's probably the best time in the world to tackle that so now since the water heater's disconnected we're gonna undo the hose connection at the bottom and haul it out hopefully it's a lot lighter now so next item on the agenda is to remove all this stuff here so um hmm yeah we'll just we'll remove this yeah we're just going to leave the copper sticking out the wall i think that's what we're going to do use a map gas torch got a fireproof cloth up here make some adjustments let me get some thumbtacks or something just to stick this to the wall i don't get a drywall screw maybe this will work maybe not there we go as they say in italian right and we're going to be pulling but we want the discussion plate to stay there we go that'll do it [Applause] hello where the water come from [Music] there she goes dump that in our bucket of water not a drop of water to be found so i'm not really sure what's going on there uh all right yeah let's get that street 90 off now there's water in there i could see it boiling let's try our wet dry vac and see if that helps suck the water out of the pipe let's give that another shot i think we still got water he goes a little bit of water all it takes didn't mess up the wall too badly right i'm gonna do the same thing on the hot side i'll spare you guys the paint on there all right so we're all done we got everything out of the way now i think we're ready to get the new water heater over here and just kind of set it on that pan and see how everything is going to plumb out i'm not a big believer in unboxing videos but what the heck why not all right i give up how's this thing come apart okay let's see you have to kind of unfold the top and bottom sides interesting design i'm gonna oh clear going to break the box and cut the box that'll do pretty durable packaging nice job there we go i think you're seeing her backside though or her side side there's the front pretty huh i wonder if i can lift this thing all right guys this is where i bust my back trying to lift this thing she is a heavy girl let's give it a shot oh boy she's really heavy i might have to call on some reinforcements so i think i'm going to orient it about like that uh the main reason is i want that cool air outlet blowing out into the garage to maximize the air conditioning in fact it's blowing at the air conditioner it's not going to circulate that well so i think this is probably going to maximize the cooling effect that my mom gets from this it's also going to make the piping a bit easier so i'm thinking this is our hot water outlet right here this pipe and that's the stub out in the wall for the hot water so i think i'm just going to do a 90 and a ball valve about like that i did a tee into the ac drain line i probably shouldn't do that but i'm going to anyway i think we'll be okay doing that i just snaked the whole thing out there's no boogers in there so now we'll have to get the cold water from the other side of the water heater to go all the way to the bottom down there that could be a little trickier but i think we can manage okay i spent way more time on the drain line than i should have but it is what it is needed to be done still got to insulate a little piece right here but it's uh sloped right running right perfect still got to hook up the other float switch but that's a project for later so i got these pipes roughed in here that's the cold side on the right and up there at the top left you got the hot side so um i think yeah i'm going to solder those not on the wall because it's silly to do that and artificially constrain myself so i'm going to get those down on the concrete slab and solder those [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so you guys saw that was it worked you got to clean the pipe first you can use sandpaper or emery cloth if you don't have one of these pipe cleaners you can buy these at lowe's at home depot they're not expensive got to clean the fitting and the pipe then you hit it with flux heat and then solder really not that difficult i'm just going to repeat this for the remaining joints okay got all the lines soldered in so again this is our hot side cold side comes down over 45 out the water is on no leaks so we're good here now i do have to still solder a piece onto the uh the cold side ball valve at the bottom there i didn't want to solder it on with the water heater out of the way because i wasn't sure how long the piece i'm going to need there so i'm going to put the water here back in the pan hopefully for the last time and then uh that'll be it then we can hook everything up and turn the water heater on okay got all the piping of the water heater done so there's our cold side down there there's our hot side right there still to do uh a pipe down from the thermal pressure relief valve probably just go into the pan cause the pan we know has a drain still took up the electrical and the condensate also to put a a bonding jumper between the hot and the cold side wasn't there before but need to have that on second thought a more sane next step is probably to turn the water back on to make sure we fill the tank because we don't want to power up the tank if the elements are not covered for the same reason we didn't want to power up the old one we don't want to burn out those elements so let's uh let's turn on the cold and hot water i opened the thermal pressure relief valve just to let the air out of the tank just so we don't build up a you know don't turn it into a compressed air can uh tank let's wait is full um some water came out the thermal pressure relief valve i opened all of the hot water faucets in the house and waited till a steady stream of water came out so tank is full we should be good to hook up the electrical now all right let's take off this cover there we go so that comes out like that we should have some wires in here oh lots of wires okay got that wire that wire we have a ground somewhere where is that going is that already grounded to something i can't really tell this thing's so darn tall yeah the ground is already hooked up so we're good there so what are these guys for i don't have to hook up high voltage to those do i think i'm gonna look at the manual for this one manual these those tiny little tiny little red and black wires go to the big red black wires on the water heater i sure hope that uh they call it a cta module i hope that cta module has a buck converter to step down 240 volts otherwise we're gonna have a bad day all right so i got this plate hooked up here snip off some of these wires kind of freshen things up a little bit [Music] some fresh conductor here all right so it sounds like this what this low voltage drive i guess it's high voltage now just like that sure hope those instructions are right i mean i can't imagine this thing wouldn't be designed to handle the voltage of the hot water heater takes but i guess we'll find out okay that seems secure what's up sorry guys there were some tools laying on the mic hopefully you didn't get squashed there all right let's boot this thing up let's boot this thing up with the cover open just make sure everything works okay then we'll we'll put her back together now if the magic smoke comes out you guys will be the first to see no magic smoke says disabled on the display let me get you guys looking at the display there we go let's turn it on cool let's do enter next alarm yes all right yep okay wow cool you can put on different demands so there's that's electric heat i guess it's the backup vacation energy saver high demand and heat pump i guess i should turn on the fan and the refrigeration circuit there it goes it certainly did that she's in theory making water okay she's running i guess i better do some of the ancillary things like the thermal pressure relief valve the the condensate drain and i got to do um the bonding jumper i realized i may have glossed over an important point before when i was talking about a bonding jumper so the two hot and cold water lines that come in from the wall under the water heater come down that copper pipe so the back of the unit comes down over into those flexible hoses right so there's one down there on the cold side there's one up there on the on the hot side now the bonding jumper because those hoses are not necessarily electrically conductive they're not designed to be they probably are but they're not designed to be code requires a bonding jumper between the hot and the cold side and really all that amounts to is a clamp like this you can pick these up at lowes or home depot with a wire going between them it's that simple and it clamps on the cold water side on the on the right hot water side and the left you just tighten these screws and it tightens down onto the on the pipes i think they probably sell on amazon too if i can find some i'll leave links in the description the things that sons do for their mothers right so uh since i last hit record i had these two float switches in on the ac and i wired them in series so if either one detects water it shuts the unit off i put a vent in here in case i decide to put a trap outside because we already have a trap here we don't want to double trap we need air behind water so there's a a riser here with a hole drilled in the top and this riser must be higher than the float switch otherwise if it detects water it won't shut the unit off it'll just flood now let's take a look at that jumper that i was talking about that's what it looks like when it's installed if you see in the far pipe that's the coal pipe we have uh the clamp the green wire going to the pipe on the left or the clamp on the pipe enough which is the hot side so we're just kind of electrically tying those two pipes together it's that simple we have our condensate drain i think i think it's been there for a little while um i looked in the manual then rheem doesn't say it needs a trap so i didn't bother installing one so i just came put a clean out up here did a t 45 45 into the t that i put in that drain line back there when i cleaned it out and uh yeah it's pretty flow flow i'm not too concerned about you know any any significant amount of content there's barely a drop in there it's been running for a while uh i think the only thing we have to do left is the thermal pressure relief valve so let's figure out where we're going to route that i guess we could route it into the pan right because it has a drain it might be good i don't have any more threaded adapters left hey guys apologize in advance but it's kind of cramped back here so i soldered in this copper pipe here just comes over that way and into the pan it's probably not the right way to do it because if that thing ever dumps gonna put water in that pan and this thing's probably gonna shut off but maybe that's okay um if it causes a problem i'll figure some melts out i can always tie into the old stub out right there for the thermal pressure relief valve but it's higher than the valve which i'm not thrilled about you know the valve is right there and that stub that's a little bit higher enough you can see that but i think we're done here guys not much left to do this garage is a mess my mom ran out of beer too that's going to slow me down i have to put a little bit of insulation on that condensate line right in that corner maybe we're done [Music] hey guys this is kind of what i was referring to with the the ball valve on the hot side so i just leave the nut on there and the handle on top so if someone does need to use that valve they can but no one's going to be turning this valve and causing a safety issue unless they know what they're doing hopefully uh okay i think that's it for today i haven't gone over any of the smart features maybe i'll do a follow-up video on that i'm really beat guys it's six six thirty i've been here since eight o'clock this morning doing all this stuff and i wasn't planning on rebuilding the whole air conditioning drain line but that's what had to happen so that's what i did so i think i'm going to call it quits for now anybody has any questions let me know concerns comments criticisms i'm sure you guys will have criticisms i think it came out pretty nice i'm happy with it runs well still to put that insulation on there i'll do it another time i'm exhausted anyway hope you guys found this video helpful if you did please subscribe give me that thumbs up stay safe everybody and hope maybe uh should i do this is the way to do the energy tracking maybe the app has an energy tracker that'd be kind of cool i'll try and do some kind of follow-up video if you go tell me what you guys want to see in the comments and i'll focus on that when i do the follow-up thanks guys take care

Channel: Joe's Garage

Views: 37,591

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Id: LF2OB-glwMY

Length: 34min 30sec (2070 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022