My understanding is that gas water heaters are made with glass lined steel tanks and that they usually fail because the steel rusts out. What I want to know is: How does the water get to the steel if it is glass lined? Does the glass lining have holes and/or cracks in it when it is new? Do holes and/or cracks develop later? If the holes and/or cracks develop later, how and why do they appear?
I have read in this newsgroup that water heaters with 12 year warranties cost about $100 more than heaters with a 6 year warranty. How much more would a heater with a copper tank cost (if mass produced in reasonable quantities) and how long would it last if the water pH was reasonably high? (What is the minimum pH that copper can tolerate anyway? My guess would be about 5.5.) Thank you in advance for all replies.
A few different ways. Hopefully not. Quite possibly. Leaky internal/interface plumbing, chemical reactions caused by things like hard water, calcium buildup, etc.
Wise old man once explained it to me: There is no difference betwen those two water heaters, in a physical sense. Nothing except the model number and warranty length. Just like most things on earth, it's possible to generate mortality tables and *know* how long a water heater should last. The $100 is simply an extended warranty. It's all in the tables.
«Wise old man once explained it to me: There is no difference betwen those two water heaters, in a physical sense. ... The $100 is simply an extended warranty»
Wise old man is not so wise. The difference is the warranty length AND the size/quality of the sacrificial anode that retards the corrosion of the tank. A longer warrantied gas water heater **will** last longer before it fails.
Where is this anode? Is it replaceable? A friend has a WH in a cabin upstate and says he has to replace the WH every 3-4 years due to the mountain water. Would replacing the anode every year or 2 extend the life?
The last cheep (sp) cheap tank I had, I just replaced after 16 years. I guess it is just a bit of luck maybe from one unit to the next plus as you say the size of the anode. joevan
I see that somebody else has suggested otherwise wrt water heaters, but I do recall car batteries being sold with varying-length warranties, and as far as I could see it was the same battery, but they punched a different warranty expiration date depending on the price paid.
MB
On 01/04/04 08:22 pm I-zheet M'drurz put fingers to keyboard and launched the following message into cyberspace:
They fail due to failure of the glass lining. It fails due to the manufacture of the tank but more likely, the handling of the tank before or during installation. Bumps, hit, drops etc. effect the lining and then the water is against the steel. If the glass was intact all over the steel, the tank wouldn't fail from the inside out. Problem is, all lining will fail at some point if there is hard water in the tank and heat is applied under the resulting scale. Steam is created under and in the 'sediment' (hard water scale) and steam is very powerful. The resulting explosion causes a break in the lining and time is now the enemy to bare steel under water. Water of very varying quality as far as it being acidic or otherwise aggressive to bare steel. And of course the outside of oil and gas fired water heaters (the tank) is also bare steel with flame added every so often for various periods of time.
Anyway, here's a copy of a (false) statement I saw on one of the URLs in a post on down in the thread: "Water softeners can help reduce sediment, but anodes can corrode in as little as six months if the water is over-softened."
Question: How do you over soften water? Water softening is the removal of hardness from a water. All the water tests I've ever used states water as soft if not hard to some 'degree'; usually stated as grains per gallon or mg/l or ppm, of hardness. I know of and use a tincture soap water test that shows if the water is soft or hard but... maybe these water heater manufacturers and web site guys know something about water hardness that I don't? But I don't think so. Water is either soft or hard, and the amount of hardness is measurable but the softness, it is not measurable.
Gary Quality Water Associates
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Ain't life grand when everybody uses different terms, but I think this is a trick question. Of course you can't make water too soft, because soft in absolute terms means an absence of minerals, i.e., pure water. But water quality and water softner people (you?) talk about hardness which is the concentration of certain minerals and they consider softness the absence of just those specific minerals. I'll bet that what they meant wasn't "too soft" but too conductive by adding replacement ions. Now whether water softners really increase the concentration of ions to significantly the increases the corrosion of the anode, I don't know.
I had read that the 12 year warranty models usually had to anodes vs the one anode in the 6 year warranty model. They know that you aren't going to actually replace the sacraficial anode.
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