White Trash Home Repair

This is my Water Heater...notice how it is not as tall as yours?

That is because it is supposed to be used in a mobile home. When we first moved in the Water Heater quit working within a week. Luckily my wife and her family are awesome, and instead of buying a new Water Heater, we replaced the elements, and everything was lovely. This last weekend as we were getting ready for bed, Beki and I heard a tremendously awful noise. It lasted about two seconds, and it sounded as if someone was jackhammering something in our house. We looked around for a half hour, but couldn't figure out what it was, so we went to bed hoping that our house wasn't going to explode during the night. (We would much prefer it to explode during the day.)

Monday morning Beki woke me up with good news and bad news: The Good News - she knew what the sound was. The Bad News - It was the Water Heater. New Elements should not burn out in a year and a half, so we were thinking that this time we might have a serious problem on our hands. In case you have never had to deal with changing the elements on your Water Heater, I shall explain how this is done.

Step #1 - You have to drain the tank. This seems like it should be straight forward, there is a drain on the bottom, you hook a hose up, turn the water off to the tank, and drain. Except that during its life, your Water Heater builds up sediment and junk in the bottom, which sometimes get in the way of draining. We were having a rough time getting the drain clear, and we were throwing ideas around about how we could get something to loosen the sediment. Beki wanted to hook up the air-compressor to the drain hose and blast the sediment back, but we didn't have an attachment that would let us do this. If only we had someone in the house with extensive experience blowing into things...

Yup, I had to blow into the drain hose and see if I could generate enough pressure to get the sediment to move and allow the water to drain. The good news is that it worked, and the bad news is that it worked, for once I got the sediment to move there was 40 gallons of water and gravity working against me. At least I got my mouth closed before I got hit in the face by nasty sediment water...

Step #2 - Take out the old elements and look for damage. Evidently there is a special tool that you need to do this, and apparently we own one, I had seen it in the shed before, and had no idea what it was. If your element looks like this:

then it is broken. (Notice how there is a hole burned completely through it?) But why would it burn out in only a year and a half? Beki checked in the bottom of the tank, and we had so much sediment that it had actually come into contact with the element, which burned it out. So somehow we needed to get the sediment out of the bottom of the tank. This is where white trash awesomeness pays off. 1 Shop-vac + 1 regular vacuum attachment + 1 clear plastic drain hose + duct tape = SEDIMENT SUCKER OF AWESOME!

I don't know what surprised us more, the fact that we came up with this, or the fact that it worked!
It was pretty gross work, sometimes the chunks were too big and Beki would have to pull them out of the tube.
In the end we got most of the grossness vaccumed out, and we were able to get back to fixing our Water Heater. Here is what we ended up with. (Warning, this is gross)

Step #3 - Put the new Element in, tighten everything up and turn the water back on!

(There are some steps that I didn't mention, such as "Turn off the electricity to the Water Heater" and "Go to the store and buy a new element," but I think you are smart enough to do that on your own.)

So it took most of our evening, but once again we can take a hot shower!