Guides For Do-It-Yourself Electric Water Heater Repair

The breeze is cold and you woke up early to bath as you prepare for your work. Then, you realized that the water is freezing so you heated the water using your electric water heater to help you withstand it. To your dismay though, your appliance failed to function well so your water for bathing remained too cold—cold enough to make your nerves shaking. In this instance, you need nothing else but electric water heater repair.

Apparently, the availability of electric water heater is providing a lot of helpful functions—both for domestic and commercial purposes. This vitally helps in heating water for cooking, bathing, cleaning, space heating, and many more. So, once this fails to function well, a number of inconveniences can also occur.

Good thing, you don’t have to constantly rely to a professional repair man to fix your electric water heater. By knowing what to do, you can do the repair yourself. Hence, you don’t have to endure the inconveniences for quite long and you don’t have to shell out more expenses for the repair.

So, if your electric water heater is showing you some problem, you can refer to the electric water heater repair guides detailed in the following discussions:

•    Water is not hot

First, take off the upper thermostat cover plate and inspect the high limit control button. If it has tripped, simply press the control button to reset it.

You can also check the input terminals for power.  This is located at the upper thermostat. You can see this marked with L2 and L2. If power is absent, then take a look at the wiring or circuit breakers to the water heater.

As well, take note that when the water does not heat up, the upper thermostat should supply power to the upper heating element. So, check for power at the upper heating element. If you notice a voltage at the heating element but the element still fails from getting hot; then, the heating element needs to be replaced.

Meanwhile, if power is absent at the upper heating element; then, it is the upper thermostat that needs to be replaced.

•    Water is extremely hot

The problem in this case lies on one of the thermostats. Check for voltage above the heating element. If power is functioning above the heating element, then the top thermostat is damaged. If power is also functioning at the lower heating element, the problem then lies on the lower thermostat.

It is also possible that the thermostats are not firmly pushed against the tank.

•    Water  is not hot enough

The lower thermostat might be defective. In this case, the lower part of the tank will not be heated so the supply of hot water will be significantly reduced.

It is also possible that either the upper or lower thermostat is defective. You can note this when one of these has no power. In case the problem lies here, your only choice is to replace the damaged part.

•    Stinky

The electric water heater can smell stinky once bacteria showed a reaction with the magnesium anode rod, which often results to rotten egg odor. To avoid this, you should clean the tank using chlorine bleach or use aluminum instead of anode rod.

Most of electric water heater repair are simple to do. So, learning more about the repair you can perform by yourself for your malfunctioning electric water can really save you a good amount of money.