What's up everyone? Welcome back to The Durbin Compound. If you haven't met me already, my name
is Devin Durbin. So today on the channel we're going over some preventative maintenance things
for your home and your hot water heater. I'm going to show you exactly what it takes to
drain your hot water heater and just how important it is. First I'm going to explain
it on the drawing board, just what's going on, and what we need to prevent. And then we'll go
downstairs and we're going to do it hands-on. So I hope you guys enjoy today's video. Stay tuned!
All right guys, let's talk about exactly what we're about to do. All right, here's your hot water tank.
I'm going to show you exactly why it's imperative that you flush your tank yearly.
So anywhere you have input from your water, whether it's from a well, or a municipality,
you're going to have contaminants in the water. So if you live, local to me, is a municipality
that has a bunch of calcium in their water. So I've been on many install jobs where a
hot water heater has lasted three or four years and it is absolutely toast and full
of calcium. So what happens is all these contaminants in these solids pack up in
the bottom of your water heater because the solids fall down in the water. Right? They pack
in and make this basically a coral reef in the bottom of your hot water heater. Whether
you have an electric water heater, you have elements coming out like this, or you have gas.
All right, your gas burner at the bottom, it inevitably just heats the bottom of the cast-iron
tank. If you have this coral reef of solids just packed in the bottom couple inches of your hot
water heater, it's going to be horribly inefficient. And it's also going to cause undue stress on the
system because you're super heating these solids in order to get this water to temperature. So if
you have an electric water heater here, your first indicator that you are packed full
of solids is your bottom heating element goes out. Now it goes out because it is packed around
with solids and it super heats and it basically just nails that element. It just destroys it
in an instant, after you have packed it full and it can't get water in there anymore. So that is
why it's absolutely imperative to drain your water heater once a year--to keep all these sediments out
of the tank. So I'm going to show you when we go downstairs, you don't want to just open your valve
100% right away. This is the number one takeaway from this video. Do not open your
valve all the way, right away, because you're going to basically take all of this weight, and
all of this pressure from this water, and you're going to shove the contents of anything, any crap
that's in here, you going to shove them right into your valve or down your hose. So now you've clogged
up that valve. Now you need to take out your valve. Okay? So just think about it. Go slow. Open it
slowly. I will show you downstairs. I'll open it slowly, back closed, open it slowly, back closed. So
that you're trying to get water and sediment out of this drain at the same time. You don't want
all sediment or you're going clog it in a hurry. Trust me. I've been there. So if you take this off
and no water comes out, you have a problem. If you take the valve off of the tank and no water comes
out, you might as well plan on replacing this tank very, very soon because it is packed with
sediment. So I've seen it to the point where we didn't see the end of the sentiment that
was coming out of the tank. We ended up having to cut it apart and it was more than a third of the
way full with calcium deposits. So I've been there. I've seen it. This is why I'm making the video for
you. So, drain your tank once a year. Drain it out of a hose. I'm going to show you exactly
how to do it. Let's go downstairs. All right, so now that we're down by the water heater, first things
first, is you always want to turn off the power to an electric water heater. You can usually tell if
it's electric or gas because a gas water heater would have a cover down here and a gas valve. You
would have another pipe over here that would be your gas line. So I'll roll in a picture of a gas valve
water heater now, so you can decipher whether you have electric or you have gas. If you don't have
a valve on the outside and you have two access covers, this is where your heating elements are
and your thermostats. So we know this is an electric water heater. We're going to swoop over to our panel
here and shut off the water heater. Okay? Now the reason why you want to shut that off is because
as we drain water out of here and the elements don't have any water to heat up, they'll get super
hot and you can burn them out very, very quickly. Remember always shut off the water, or always shut
off the electric or the gas before starting this process. Now, the next step is to shut off the main
water line that fills the hot water heater. So I'll shut off the main water line here. It should
go in the cold outlet. You can usually tell on the top of it. See? It says cold. That's where your cold
water is coming in. Wow! It's a little dusty down here. I need to dust. The cold is always where it
comes in and then the hot is where it goes out. So we've shut off our water here. Now what we're
going to do is hook a hose up. Usually you'll either have a drain plug like this or a drain
sillcock here, like this, or you'll have one on the side. Sometimes they're plastic and they have a
little slot in them. Just take a screwdriver to manipulate that, you know, that drain. All right, so
I always just use a nice, cheap hose and thread it on to my connection here. You would do the same and
route it to a drain that's close by. I always route mine into the floor drain on the other
side of the basement. So when you're doing this, you want to open them slowly
and close them, open them slowly and close them, until it's all the way open. That way when you stir up your sediment like
I was talking about earlier, you're not flushing it all down through here and clogging your hose.
So you'll be able to hear it if there's sediment and you're getting a lot of crap coming through.
Okay, so literally I didn't hear much, other than right there at the beginning, there might have
been some crap in the bottom of the tank, but I slowly opened it and closed it, so as to not let
it go all at once. You don't want to clog your tube. So let's go over to the other end of the
hose and make sure that it is draining. Okay, so we have very little draining out. So the reason
why we have very little draining out is because it's basically creating a pressure on the house.
So we need to open up a sink upstairs and allow the air to basically allow the water to flow out.
So go upstairs or in another part of the house and open up a sink and it will drain faster. All right,
you hear the pressure coming through? Okay, so it's definitely got suction on this outlet. All right,
back down in our drain, you can see we're flowing a lot more water. So we'll go ahead and continue
to drain this out. Like I said, I recommend doing it once a year just, to get any sediment or crap
out of the bottom of the tank. All right, now that we're done draining, we can go ahead and close our
valve here. And what we're going to do is refill the tank. So remember your faucet is still open
upstairs or another part of your house. So what we're going to do is literally just close this
off and we're going to slowly turn this on. So we're going to turn on our inlet water here and
let it flow slowly. Now I always just crack it a little bit. I don't put it on full force right away.
You will hear the bubbles and everything going through the water tank.
Now it is filling it completely up, and up until, it goes back out to our faucet
that's open. Let's go upstairs and wait on it. This will take a while
to fill. This one's 60 gallons. So it's going to take a while to fill that up.
All right, so you guys might get a lot of air coming out of--all right perfectly
normal to get a lot of air coming out of the system. Just want to make sure you
run it on hot for a while and purge all of the air out of the system that you
basically introduced by flushing it. Some sinks it might take a while. Some sinks
are right away. It just depends on how far it is from the hot water heater.
All right, now that we know that we have flushed all of our water out, and all of the air is purged
out of the system, we know the water heater is completely full. We can come back over to the
breaker panel and switch our water heater back on, and/or light the gas pilot on the water heater. So,
let's wrap this video up. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed the video today. Of course,
you know what time it is. Give me a thumbs up, or thumbs down. Whatever you guys are into. Interact
with me in the comments. Let's see exactly what you have to say. If you have any questions, post
them up. I try to get back to my commenters at least within one day or 24 hours. So I'll try
to help you out if I can. I hope that we will help you in your situation and you don't have
to call the man. That's what the channel is all about. I'll see you guys in the next one.