Mythbusters Water Heater Explosion

this is either a hot water heater or it's a bomb if it's a hot water heater there's no problem it just beats the water in your house if it's a bomb it fails catastrophically sending the bottom shooting out sending the top shooting up this floor isn't going to offer much resistance to that water heater the question we want to know is what's it going to do when it hits this roof is it going to make a nice clean round hole i can stair all the way into the basement through or is it going to be interrupted on its journey into the sky and never make it out of the house that's what we want to find out deep in buster's basement changes are occurring in his water heater changes that could affect his life oh look we've turned red 175 psi ah this is killing me now it's really starting to accelerate all that potential just waiting 325. oh god it's any second now i don't want to turn back and look at the pressure anymore i don't want to take my eyes off of it 3 30. okay i'm gonna do some live math here the hot water heater itself is 18 inches in diameter now for the area of that it's pi r squared which equals 254 square inches of the bottom now you've got a pounds per square inch pressure inside of 336 multiply that by 254 you get 85 and a half thousand pounds of pressure let me say that again 85 and a half thousand pounds of pressure pushing against the bottom of the heater you would fail too 335 you know what i see i see a hole in the roof man holy cow now that's what i call mission accomplished i wish you could be here for this kind of explosion because when the hot water finally blows staring right at it because we know where the zone is and the thud that comes out of it is so deeply guttural and still kind of done it's great watch it again give me some skin there looking at the damage the water heater did to the building it left some neat holes in the first floor and through the roof which is no big deal but looking more carefully you realize what a shock the entire building took wow yeah look at how much damage it did to the plywood right here the cinder blocks that i put underneath the ground floor are actually shattered from the downward push it actually lifted the entire roof off of its seat and then set it down you know this would pretty much ruin your house

Channel: ansaplumbing

Views: 1,546,680

Keywords: Mythbusters, water, heater, explosion, 2 story, evolution, ansa, plumbing, safety

Id: 9bU-I2ZiML0

Length: 3min 9sec (189 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2010