Installing a water heater can be a lot of work if you don’t know the tricks of the trade. Some experienced plumbers can have a new water heater installed and the old one loaded up in there truck within an hour and a half.Make sure before you instal a water heater in your home you know what the local water heater code requirements are.
The most time consuming thing about installing a water heater is draining the old water heater. If you live in a city with hard water and you haven’t been keeping up with your preventative maintenance this can be a real chore. As water is heated it causes the lime molecules in water to fuse together coating the inside of the water heater. That means when you try and drain the water heater nothing comes out.Most of your local supply houses sell a small pump that you can drop down trough the T&P line to suck the water out of the tank from the top. If that is not an option then you can try and replace the drain valve on the water heater with a full port ball valve. This can cause a big mess if it doesn’ t work correctly. If this is your first time installing a water heater i would not recommend this. Another option is to pull the water heater out full of water. Remember water weighs in at around 8.5 pounds per gallon so if the water heater is on a platform you could get your self hurt.
After you get the old water heater out then all you have to do is get the new one in place and get it hooked up. Hooking up a water heater is made very simple by using copper flex lines. The flex lines can be bent in all kinds of different ways to make the correct distances from the pipes coming out of the wall to the inlet and outlet of the water heater. Always use new flex lines when you install a new water heater. Remember you just spent 300 to 400 dollars on a new water heater so don’t get cheep now. If you use the old flex lines and they leak you are going to trash the new heater and you will not be able to have any warren-tee from the manufacture.
After you have the water flex lines and if it is a gas water heater the gas flex lines reinstalled it is time to fill it back up with water. Do not turn the water heater on until it is full of water. you could cause all kinds of damage to your new water heater. As you are filling your new water heater up go into the bathroom and turn on the tub. Not a shower but a tub. This will give somewhere for the air in the water lines to go as the water heater is filling up.The reason you use a tub is because a tub does not have a screen that catches the debris in the water lines. Your faucets or shower heads can be plugged up and cause you all kinds if problems.
After you have all the air bled out is is time to turn the water heater on and enjoy a hot shower or bath.
