Okay, so I know I promised a step-by-step how-to on thoroughly cleaning your dryer exhaust ports, and it is in fact in the works. Isabella is my camera operator on that one and she hasn’t had a moment to spare. In the meantime, I wanted to write about something truly nasty that is going on in a lot of our homes.
The last few weeks, Caroline has really been having alot of problems with her skin after showers. So we tried using soaps without SLS in it, tried skipping soap, except for where needed, every-other day, etc. We even looked into getting a whole-home filtration system put in.
I concider myself pretty handy. I do 99% of all of our home maintenance and probably 80% of our vehicle maintenance. So I’m ashamed to admit this little thing slipped by me.
When was the last time you flushed your water heater? What? You didn’t know you were supposed to? Me either. I DID know you could. But I always thought it was one of those things that you did when there was a problem.
Our water does not stink. It is not colored. It tastes fine.( Yes, I drink tap water.) But as part of our Spring cleaning this year, I decided to give it a go. What came out was disgusting. There are numerous videos on youtube on how to do it. And it’s pretty easy. I’ll embed one at the end of this post that was helpful to me.
Basically, there are just 4 steps.
1) Shut off power/gas to water heater.
2) Shut off cold water supply to water heater
3) Attach hose to drain spout and open to let out the water (and crud) in the tank
4) Repeat filling and draining tank as many times at it takes to get clear, clean water coming out.
In most cases, from what I’ve read or heard, it should only take a minute or two of running water out of the tank to get the gunk out. Well, I was not so lucky. I had to repeatedly fill and drain my tank several times, in addition to letting the water continuously run out the drain while keeping the cold water supply on, before I got continuous streams of clear water.
To be clear, our water was NOT dirty looking or smelling. And even the crud that came out of our tank looked like clean crud, if that’s possible. It kinda looked like really small aquarium rocks and sand. No doubt calcium.
The lesson is that about every three months I’m gonna take 10 minutes to do a quick flush of this thing. and I’m sure it won’t be so bad as it was. We have had this place a year and never did this simple maintenance. Who knows if the previous owner ever did. Time for Caroline to jump in the shower and check the results!
As an after thought… If you do this, it is normal for your faucets to sputter a bit the first time you use them after finishing the cleaning. This is just air that got into the lines durring the cleaning process. It’s not unusual for some sediment to even come out of your faucets for a second. As soon as you’re done flushing your tank, and turned everything back on, just open every hot water faucet in your home, one by on, for a few seconds. (don’t forget your clothes washer hookup.)
Hope to have the dryer pictures added to that post by tomorrow. And here’s a video showing the tank flushing process…