water heater tank

Drain the tank down some, braze up the hole, dig out your paperwork from when the tank was purchased to see if it has a lifetime warranty. If so, start aggressively agitating to get a new tank for free.

When the new tank comes, tear down this one. I found a brass/copper heat exchanger inside my old one which weighed about 50 pounds, and at $3/# for copper and $2/# for brass, that's worth scrapping!

Grant

| > my bad, I didn't keep up with replacing the anode (I forgot).. | >

| >

| >

| > now I'm not a welder but I've done a lot of welding in the past from car | > panels to 1/4" plate - what would be the best advice, either: | >

| > drill it out, weld it up and weld a plate over the weld or just get another | > tank? | >

| | Drain the tank down some, braze up the hole, dig out your paperwork from | when the tank was purchased to see if it has a lifetime warranty. If so, | start aggressively agitating to get a new tank for free. | | When the new tank comes, tear down this one. I found a brass/copper heat | exchanger inside my old one which weighed about 50 pounds, and at $3/# | for copper and $2/# for brass, that's worth scrapping!

nice :)

these tanks only have a 5 year warranty and I'm a couple of years past that :/

no copper inside either unfortunately ..

I couldn't see that it wouldn't be a viable repair but I wasnt able to find much info on the web about similar repairs .. and it seemed a shame to throw a tank for one small hole! I was thinking of mig welding it, but braizing it will probably do nicely

Mig weld will be a disaster, the pin hole is likely the center of a larger thin spot. Hit it with mig, instant burn through.

It is always a safety issue to weld > | k wrote:

Having cut many tanks apart I have found that once a pin hole is found, there are several other places where the metal is nearly gone. Buy another. In regards to the anode rod, I never replace mine, reacts with the water here (farm) an produces a bad smell. My tank last about ten years, some as long as fifteen. Rick

thanks everyone - I think i'll go with the general wisdom and get a new tank, cut the old one in half and use it for boiling crabs :)

regards

karl

One thing on those is this :

Is there an iron pipe in the water system - maybe on the unit ? Or is it all plastic or copper.

I had iron and copper in the leadin - Ion migration is hard and fast. The plummer pointed it to me and knew I didn't do it - but felt it was a poor plummer in a rush.

Mart> I have a gas hot water pressure storage tank that's sprung a leak from

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the tank is all iron, 'vitrified' so they say - never explaining it's only vitified *half way up* the tank :/ with copper pipes.

| I had iron and copper in the leadin - Ion migration is hard and fast. | The plummer pointed it to me and knew I didn't do it - but felt it was | a poor plummer in a rush.

they include a magnesium anode in the design but it's hard to get to, no one ever replaces them and every 6 years (a year outside the warranty) they fail

stainless tanks seem rare here in Australia

Replace it, but they can be salvaged for alternate-energy projects.

I fixed a rust-through in the tank of my solar water heater with an oval stainless steel patch that fit in through the oval-ized hole. The patch was sealed with rubber sheet and held by two screws which were necessary to position it inside the tank anyway. I could have welded it but the heat probably would have damaged the glass/enamel lining around the weld and I couldn't inspect the inside. It's an old electric water heater tank.

Then I poured in some LPS-3 and swished it all around, poured it out and left the open tank hanging in the sun for a few weeks to dry out. That was two years ago. There's no oily sheen or chemical smell to the water and the tank held 40 pounds of test pressure. There was no rust discoloration in the water when I drained it last fall.

This tank is disconnected from the mains and not pressurized, filled through a garden hose with a backflow preventer, and the water is only used for laundry, so I can get away with repairs I wouldn't do to the household plumbing.

My indoor electric water heater sits on a sturdy platform with a drain pan underneath and a bucket under that to catch leaks. There's a ping- pong ball in the bucket to show the water level, which is otherwise hard to see.

Jim Wilkins

My father used to fix our HW tanks with a sheet metal screw stuck through a piece of old inner tube & screwed into the hole. Of course after fixing the hole a new leak would inmvariably show up within a few months or so & after fixing that the "spring a leak/time" line was a classic logramithic curve :).

Interesting to note & proving theat they really *Don't* "Build'em Like They Usetah", (even back then!) the life span of each subsequent tank also seemed to follow the log curve as well :(

Somewhere around 1968-69 they gave up & bought an electric heater, my mother finally had to replace it last year. :\

H.

H.

The Iron copper joint causes an electric current flow. If you look at your tank, you have plastic washers that keep isolation. It is this ionic flow across the joint that causes trouble on the tank.

In the states, iron pipe is often used between the street and house. Often older pipes down streets are iron. Hydrogen attacks the iron and it becomes brittle. The town next to use here has H2S in the water and that really eats up the pipe. Miles of iron pipe have been replaced with plastic.

Martin

Mart> | One thing on those is this :

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Sorry, no. I've only done a tempering tank to warm up the water heater feed and that batch solar collector. I don't use enough energy to make a more complex project cost-effective.

try this: