CHARLIE: Floyd from Spring he asks, “Tom, is there a need,” he says, “to drain my gas water heater to rid it of any deposits to prolong it’s life? If so, how would you do that?”
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If you wanted to follow the rules, which you would end up losing, it’s a losing battle, you would start every three months draining your water heater. By the time you got to your third year, you probably would just want to shoot yourself because it’s still building up more stuff than you can get out of there.
TOM: Nice.
CHARLIE: Because, we have such hard water. What I would tell you is this, like me, and many others out there, we call someone like AquaTex, we put a water softener on our home. In fact, I just brought a bag of salt home from Lowe’s yesterday and put it in my Kinetico water softener, and my water heater has never been drained. It has no deposits to where you can really tell. I’m sure there’s a little bit in the bottom, but it’s 22 years old now.
If you really want to not mess with it, and have a water heater last a long time with such hard water that we have in Texas, with everything in there, get a water softener. To drain it on a regular basis, you still will lose the battle, so why put the energy into it. Just replace it every about 10 to 13 years, is the average timeline.