Wow! A water heater that’s 17 years old must be close to the end of life. Usually, you have to start thinking about replacing your water heater after 10 years. It’s better to replace the water heater before it quits working and floods the area than waiting for the failure to occur. That way, you can control the outage, while the water heater is being replaced.
Otherwise, with Murphy’s Law, the water heater will most likely fail on a holiday weekend, or at the most in opportune time. The rough ballpark cost is about $2,000 for a tank water heater and $4,000 for a tankless water heater. The tankless water heaters tend to be best for large families where everyone is using hot water at the same time. But the tankless water heater must be designed for the maximum hot water load.
The tankless water heaters might be more practical if the house is unoccupied for months during the year. If you only have electricity, then when there’s an electricity outage, you instantly have no hot water, unless you have an electric generator.
The tankless water heaters tend to last a little longer than conventional tank water heaters. But the cost tends to never break even for the extra cost of the tankless water heater, during the water heater’s lifetime.
When the water heater is being installed, it’s important that the threaded connector is not soldered while it is connected the water heater’s threads. The heat from the soldering reduces the lifetime of the threads near the water heater.
Our water heater flooded our garage because it was installed improperly at the 6 year point. Fortunately, the threaded pipe that broke could be removed and replaced. That repair cost was $295. We’ll start thinking about replacing the water heater in a few years when it’s about ten years old.
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