Water Heater – Gas/Electric

The water heater in this ’02 Winnebago Journey is the same Atwood brand that was in my ’94 Bounder so I’m use to it and had a reasonable expectation that it would work at least for a short while after I bought the rig in Feb. ’16 until I could get to servicing and/or doing maintenance on it. I didn’t expect it to take 3 years or more for me to get around to servicing it but, here we are, April of ’19.

This tank is a 10 gallon, with the OEM installed electric heater element. And there’s a switch in the hallway of the RV above the EMS panel to operate it. The element is inserted into the back of the heater before it’s installed so if it goes bad on me, it’ll be a much more difficult job to get to to change then my other Atwood where I’d installed an after market Hot Rod type electric heater.

The heater is working fine, it’s just that I stayed in Parker Arizona not long ago and learned that their water has a hardness level of 1,000 where a typical hardness is 300. That was confirmed by all the crusty white stuff on the parks faucets I saw while in that town.

That got me thinking that I’d better drain and flush my tank after I got to a different RV park. So this article is about that and what I found while checking the tank. First a couple of pictures of the outside of the heater…

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And here’s what the heater looked like shortly after I bought the rig. Didn’t look too bad back then. The rust doesn’t really affect operation so I’m not too worried about it.

And here’s what it looks like now…it sort of got away from me. Should have been checking it more often. But than again, it could have been because the hard water messed up the valve, which started dripping and that splashed minerals all over everything?

I haven’t allowed the tank much attention since I bought it but recently I did, and immediately noticed that the pressure relief valve was dripping. And there were signs of mineral build up on things. Great. It looks like it’s been dripping at least for several days, if not weeks.

Ordered a new 1/2″ pressure relief valve, Campco 10423 from Amazon and left the old one on for the 2 days it took to get the new one. Turned off the heater switch the night before the valve arrived. Once it arrived, turned off shore water at the faucet, and flipped open the paddle on the top of the old valve. Let water burble out of there for a while and then opened the petcock the PO had installed in the drain.

I turned on the shore water with the petcock open in hopes to flush any minerals out off the bottom of the tank. Too much mineral build up on the heater element isn’t good at all as it develops hot spots where the minerals are, and they tend to fail at those places. I don’t expect there to be much since this is an aluminum tank and it doesn’t really corrode or accumulate minerals like a steel tank would. But the element might be steel. The valve though, is brass and some steel and it had mineral coat and crust here and there. That’s why it was dripping.

After the tank was drained & flushed, used a 12″ adjustable wrench to unscrew the old pressure valve. An open end wrench would work too.

Applied 4 turns of Teflon tape to the threads of the valve and screwed it in. Lined it up the same way as the old valve was, the 4 layers of Teflon sort of guarantee that it’ll be tight and not leak where I set it. It’s set that way, with the open end turned slightly to the left of center so if it does drip or opens due to pressure, there’s less chance water will get inside the flame tube.

While I was in there, tried to clean things up a bit, removed some of the mineral buildup from off of some of the components.

And that’s it. New relief valve installed.