What's up everyone? Welcome back to The Durbin Compound. So today is another
Troubleshooting Tuesday. Sorry I've been M.I.A for a little bit, but we're going
to go ahead and troubleshoot a hot water heater. This is for an electric hot water
heater. If you're looking for troubleshooting a gas water heater, this
is not the place. Not the video. I'm sure I'll come out with one in the future, but
today we're going to figure out why one of the elements in this water heater is
not working. So, I'm going to show you how to troubleshoot. Do some steps and you
can diagnose it on your own at home. And then we'll go through the process of
replacing an element, if that is the case in your hot water heater at home. So stay
tuned. We'll get right down to it.
Okay, so the first step in troubleshooting this water heater is making sure we have power. So, if you don't have a multimeter,
like one of these, a digital multimeter is awesome. If you don't have one, some
people have an analog one, a cheap one, or you can use one of these test pins. This
test pin I have is from Klein. Little cheapy. I think they're $15, $20. You literally just have to have it on
and then you can put it up to the power line and it will tell you if there's
power. So, first we're going to open up the cover and we're going to test to see if
we have power. I'm going to bring you in real close. We're going to look at the
main thermostat with the reset on it. And then we'll go down to the lower element
and test that one for power as well. So I'm going show you how to do it with
this little guy here, if you have one of these. And I'm also going to show you how to
do with the multimeter. Let's get started! The panel here only takes a 1/4"
little nut driver. So these panels are real easy to take off. You're literally just
taking in the panel off. Use your screw, or you know, retain your screw and the cover.
I always put it underneath the insulation so I don't lose it.
So you're just pulling your insulation out here. And now you can look at the main
thermostat and then the top element. So usually the water heater should be hot
to the touch. Everything around here should be hot. Your outlet pipe should be hot.
Relief valve should be hot. At the bottom on my water heater, it's extremely cold.
So it's as cold as the tap water coming in. Now keep in mind, if you're
troubleshooting this and you've just run a lot of hot water, the cold water is
going to start at the bottom and naturally rise in heat. So if you just
used twenty, thirty gallons of hot water, yes, your water is going to be cold at
the bottom. So we haven't been using the hot water for a couple hours. It's
probably been all morning that we haven't used the hot water. So the bottom
of the tank should not be cold. That's giving me the indication that the bottom
element is not working. So now let's bring you in close and we'll troubleshoot
exactly how we do this and how I shoot it. Oh! I didn't tell you before, if you
want to use the good old "lick your finger" method and touch it, that'll also
tell you if there's electricity or not. DON'T DO THAT! If you like to get hit
with 240 volts, you know, you can do that, but I don't recommend that.
Okay, I think we have enough light here. I think this might help a little bit. First thing you
want to do when you come down here is touch your reset. Keep in mind that we still
have the power on. You want to make sure that you have power to this in order to
see if it's working. So one of the things you can do is you can use your little
pin tester here and test for power on both these hot legs. This is both,
a 120 volt AC, 120 volt AC, if you're here in America. So basically, what
this thing does is supply the 240 volt down to the actual heating element. This is your
heating element here. You can tell that this is on right now. I have it...what
you need to do is, if you come to your water heater, and it might not be on
at the current time. So what you want to do is you want to crank your thermostat
all the way up. So let me bring the camera down just a
little bit so you can see what I'm talking about. Okay, now that we're down
here--looking at our top thermostat. So this guy
basically, has a contact element on the back of it. And it basically sits
flat against the tank. And it figures out how hot the tank is--the cast iron right
there. And figures out if we need to turn on our heating element or not. The lower
one also has a thermostat on it. So it'll have the same kind of thing, but smaller.
So it looks like this on the back. So it is literally just making contact with
the cast iron and making sure if you need heat or not. This is an old one, so
this is just what it looks like if you were to slip it out. There's little areas
to slip it out if you needed to replace this. Basically we need to...I'll show
you exactly how to do that as well. Okay, now we're down here at our thermostat on
our upper element. So this is our upper heating element here. This is our
thermostat. You'll see a reset switch here. This resets switch is basically like
a circuit breaker on your water heater. If you're popping the main circuit
breaker at your service panel, you definitely have a direct short somewhere
and you definitely want to figure that out before you start trying to put power
to it. Or at least be around this area. Keep in mind, we have 240 volts coming in
here. So your volt multimeter should be set at above 240 volts AC. So this one
says, you know, we have to be at 700 because 200 is the max for this setting. So
we should be at 700 volts AC. That would be our maximum that we can
measure here with this multimeter. So we're going to come up here. This is our one
leg of 120 volts and our other leg of 120 volts. We should get that 240 volt reading. So we
have 245 volts. That shows that we do have power in here to our thermostat. So
now we can--I had to move the multimeter so that I could see--hopefully I didn't
come out of frame. So now we want to figure out if we have voltage here at
the heating element. So we have nothing yet here at the heating element. That means
that the hot water heater is not calling for heat. So what we want to do is...
usually if you come down here, it might be that your hot water heater is already
hot enough that it shut off this main element.
So what you can do is, you can take a little flathead screwdriver and
basically what you're going to do is you're going to turn this thermostat up. So I have
it set at about 125 degrees. I'm going to crank it up to 150. So what this will do
is you can hear it pop. You heard that audible pop. That means that now it is
supplying 240 volts to both of our heating elements. Okay. So now we know
that this heating element is getting power. So now let's go down to our lower
heating element and check that make sure it's getting power. So we're going to
make sure that this thermostat is working correctly first. So now we've
said, "Hey, the power is getting here to the top element, let's go down to the
bottom element." We'll check that one and then we'll cut the power off and check
our continuity. These are basically resistance heating elements. I'll show
you what that means here in a second. So it has to have a consistent loop. So I'll
explain that. Let's go down to the lower element. I'll show you that.
Okay, one thing to note on these electric water heaters is that the upper and
bottom element will not be on at the same time. It will basically cascade, so
that the top element will heat up first and then it will switch to the bottom
element. So we want to make sure that this bottom element is also getting its
240 volts AC. So we're going to go ahead and put our leads on here. Okay. Now we're
getting 240 volts AC down here. So this element is also getting power.
So one thing that, if you do not have power down here, what you need to do is
you need to turn the the bottom thermostat up and you need to turn the
upper thermostat down. That will turn on just this heating element. So if this is
getting 110 volts AC, that means that the thermostat up at the
top element is not telling this bottom element to turn on. So if I were to go up
to the top element right now, it would not be getting 200 volts AC. So you just
need to make sure the bottom one comes on. Now, the fact that this is getting
power and the tank is physically cold, you can feel it down here, it is cold and
we have not been running the hot water so that it's not behind. That
means that this lower element is probably bad. So let's
go up to the workbench right now. I'm going to show you how the element works,
how to shoot one on the ground. We're going to disconnect this one and shoot it
for continuity and I'll show you exactly how we can tell if this element is bad.
Okay, so there's two different kinds of elements and there's two different
wattages usually at any of your big box stores. These elements I got from Lowe's,
just as basically, an example here. This is a loop over or double back or
whatever you want to call it. Double over. Both of these elements, usually all
of the elements in your electric hot water heaters, are resistance elements. So
you will see some resistance in this element when we shoot it for
continuity. So I go ahead and open this up. What we're going to do is we're going to
shoot for continuity between these two leads. So I'm going to show you on the table,
make it, you know, make it easier to see me shooting this for continuity.
So something I like to do is always set my multimeter so that it makes an audible
beep when I have continuity. I hope you can hear that. Hopefully it's not too
high-pitched for my microphone. So when we set these leads on here, should have
continuity between them. Okay, so that shows that we have continuity.
Let's measure it for actual ohms. So we've got to ohm this out and it looks like we have
32. Oh, hold on here. I'll turn that back towards the camera. Hopefully you can see that. So a
good element here is showing 77.7 ohms. All right, cool! So
we know what a good element looks like. So let's go back over to the hot water
heater and I'll show you exactly what it's measuring. If it is open that means
the element is burnt out. So that means we're getting power to it, and it's supposed
to be working, but the resistance, or the loop here, is basically not working. The
whole reason this works is because there's resistance in this line and
as current tries to pass through it, it is heating up, so to get red-hot. So
basically if there's no loop and it has burnt itself out inside then
it cannot work. It will still have power. It just won't heat up and that's exactly
what it looks like our situation is on the hot water heater. So that is how I
troubleshoot it. So let's go down there. Let's disconnect the leads. Obviously, cut
the power off. And we'll test the continuity on that one. If it's not...if it
doesn't have continuity, then we know that is our culprit and that's what's
bad. So we're going to probably make a second video for the series on how to
change the actual heating element out. I'm not going to draw out the video to, you
know, figure out, you know, after a 30 minute video you've figured out, or you
haven't figured out what your problem is. So, let's head on back over there.
Okay, make sure, okay, I do have power still coming in. I have not shut off my water
heater yet. Hold on. Okay, now I have shut the power off to the hot water heater so
we should have no voltages coming in. Looks like we're good. Looks like I still
have something there. What is that? Oh, all right. So I can't see the multimeter. Pain
in my butt. Okay, so we just have, all right, no voltage coming in. Good.
All right, now we want to take our leads off here, off this hot water heater element
down here. Let's go ahead and pop those off. Those are Phillips head screwdrivers.
I'm going to go ahead and take these leads off and let's test our element for
continuity. Okay, there's one lead comes out and the other lead comes off.
Okay, now back on what we were talking about earlier. We want to measure for
ohms. So if this is open, we know this element is bad. So we're going to test our
leads together first. Show that we have 0.3. 0.4 ohms of
resistance between our leads. That is all in the cable. So now, let's test our
element. Okay, our element shows that it is open. So our element has burned itself
out down here. It is open, so usually that means that there is "no go." No power is
getting through. It's not making any heat. Obviously, we can tell. So
now we've narrowed it down to a bad heating element. All right guys, well,
there you have it. We troubleshot down to a bad heating element, the lower heating
element on this water heater. So I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope you got
some value. If you find that I'm of value to you, then I'd like to see around the
channel. And as always, we'll see you guys in the next video!