A Canadian Homeowner's Guide To Sediment, Sacrificial Anodes, And Knowing When To Leave The Tank Alone
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There is a moment, somewhere around year six, when the hot water starts running out faster than it used to. Maybe you hear a faint popping or rumbling from the basement when the burner fires. Maybe the water has picked up a faint metallic edge. The tank still works, so you leave it, and one morning a few winters later you find a puddle spreading across the basement floor and a plumber telling you the tank is done.
Most of what shortens a water heater's life happens quietly, in two places you cannot see. Mineral sediment settles into a crust at the bottom of the tank, where it insulates the water from the burner and makes the whole thing work harder. And a sacrificial metal rod hanging down inside the tank slowly dissolves, giving itself up so the steel around it does not rust. When that rod is gone, the tank starts corroding instead. Flushing the sediment and checking the rod are the two jobs that address both, and together they fit comfortably into a Saturday afternoon.
Here is the honest version of the time promise, though. Two hours is how long you will spend working. It is not how long the job takes from start to finish, because you need the water inside a fifty-gallon tank to cool before you drain it, and that takes a few hours on its own. The graceful way to do this is to shut the heat off after breakfast, go about your morning, and come back to it at one o'clock.
And before any of that, there is a question that decides whether you should be doing this at all. In much of Canada — Ontario especially — an enormous number of households do not own the water heater in their basement. They rent it. If that is you, the maintenance on this page is not your job, and doing it anyway can put you offside your own contract. So that is where we will start.
Walk down and look at the tank before you buy a single tool. You are looking for a sticker, a metal tag, or a wrapped label near the top or on the front panel carrying a company name — Enercare, Reliance, Direct Energy, a utility, a local home-comfort brand. Rental providers label their equipment deliberately, and the agreements say so: the standard Enercare water heater rental terms state that the unit "remains our property, does not become a fixture and you will not tamper with any tag(s) or sticker(s) identifying the water heater as rented equipment."
If a tag is there, read the next clause carefully, because it is the one that settles the question. The same agreement says that "you will not permit anyone who has not been authorized by us to service, repair, modify, move or disconnect the water heater." You are not an authorized person. Draining the tank yourself is servicing it, and if something goes wrong afterward — a drain valve that will not reseal, a flooded floor — you have handed the provider a clean argument that the damage was yours.
The current customer guidance is blunter still. Enercare tells rental customers plainly to never re-light the pilot on a rental water heater and to call for service instead. Renters do get something in return: service and repairs are covered, and the visit costs nothing. The genuinely useful thing to know is that the coverage has a carve-out for exactly this job. Unless you are paying a hard-water rental rate, de-liming and flushing due to water conditions are not covered — the provider covers only the diagnostic work. So a rented tank in a hard-water city may be quietly accumulating the same sediment yours would, with nobody flushing it.
Renting is not the wrong choice, incidentally — it is a trade of long-run cost for zero-hassle coverage, and plenty of households are happy with it. If you are weighing whether to buy out the contract or keep paying monthly, that is a separate decision with its own arithmetic.
For owners, the boundary is narrower than the internet suggests in one direction and wider than it suggests in another.
The narrow part is real. In Ontario, work on gas appliances is regulated, and the Technical Standards and Safety Authority is explicit that registered fuels contractors are the only businesses legally authorized to do fuels-related work in the province. Anyone you hire needs to be on that registry.
The wider part surprises most people. The regulation that sets out those certificates also carves out an exemption for homeowners working on their own homes. Under Ontario's fuel industry certificates regulation, a person may install or service an appliance "in a detached dwelling that is owned and occupied by the person," and may relight one "in accordance with the certified lighting instructions of its manufacturer" — with conditions attached. A newly installed appliance cannot be activated by the owner until a certificate holder confirms the installation complies. The appliance has to be maintained in safe working condition. And the dwelling must be detached, owned, and occupied by the person doing the work.
That exemption is not a licence to go poking at burners and gas valves, and nothing in this guide asks you to. Flushing a tank and swapping an anode rod are plumbing tasks; the only contact you have with the gas side is turning a control knob to its vacation or pilot setting and turning it back. Rules differ by province, so if you are outside Ontario, your provincial authority is the one that governs.
Walk down and look at the tank before you buy a single tool. You are looking for a sticker, a metal tag, or a wrapped label near the top or on the front panel carrying a company name — Enercare, Reliance, Direct Energy, a utility, a local home-comfort brand. Rental providers label their equipment deliberately, and the agreements say so: the standard Enercare water heater rental terms state that the unit "remains our property, does not become a fixture and you will not tamper with any tag(s) or sticker(s) identifying the water heater as rented equipment."
If a tag is there, read the next clause carefully, because it is the one that settles the question. The same agreement says that "you will not permit anyone who has not been authorized by us to service, repair, modify, move or disconnect the water heater." You are not an authorized person. Draining the tank yourself is servicing it, and if something goes wrong afterward — a drain valve that will not reseal, a flooded floor — you have handed the provider a clean argument that the damage was yours.
The current customer guidance is blunter still. Enercare tells rental customers plainly to never re-light the pilot on a rental water heater and to call for service instead. Renters do get something in return: service and repairs are covered, and the visit costs nothing. The genuinely useful thing to know is that the coverage has a carve-out for exactly this job. Unless you are paying a hard-water rental rate, de-liming and flushing due to water conditions are not covered — the provider covers only the diagnostic work. So a rented tank in a hard-water city may be quietly accumulating the same sediment yours would, with nobody flushing it.
Renting is not the wrong choice, incidentally — it is a trade of long-run cost for zero-hassle coverage, and plenty of households are happy with it. If you are weighing whether to buy out the contract or keep paying monthly, that is a separate decision with its own arithmetic.
For owners, the boundary is narrower than the internet suggests in one direction and wider than it suggests in another.
The narrow part is real. In Ontario, work on gas appliances is regulated, and the Technical Standards and Safety Authority is explicit that registered fuels contractors are the only businesses legally authorized to do fuels-related work in the province. Anyone you hire needs to be on that registry.
The wider part surprises most people. The regulation that sets out those certificates also carves out an exemption for homeowners working on their own homes. Under Ontario's fuel industry certificates regulation, a person may install or service an appliance "in a detached dwelling that is owned and occupied by the person," and may relight one "in accordance with the certified lighting instructions of its manufacturer" — with conditions attached. A newly installed appliance cannot be activated by the owner until a certificate holder confirms the installation complies. The appliance has to be maintained in safe working condition. And the dwelling must be detached, owned, and occupied by the person doing the work.
That exemption is not a licence to go poking at burners and gas valves, and nothing in this guide asks you to. Flushing a tank and swapping an anode rod are plumbing tasks; the only contact you have with the gas side is turning a control knob to its vacation or pilot setting and turning it back. Rules differ by province, so if you are outside Ontario, your provincial authority is the one that governs.
If the tank carries a rental sticker, stop here. Call the provider and book a service visit instead. Everything that follows assumes you own the tank outright.
Nothing on this list is exotic, and most of it is probably already in the garage — if you have worked through our two-hour kitchen faucet swap, you own most of it already. Gather everything before you shut the heat off, because the worst version of this afternoon is the one where you are standing over a half-drained tank realizing you do not have a socket that fits.
On the socket size: 1-1/16 in. is the standard hex on a residential anode rod, and A. O. Smith's own manual specifies a 1 1/16" socket wrench with an extension to remove it. Buy the socket even if you are not sure you will replace the rod this year, because you cannot inspect what you cannot remove.
About buying a rod in advance: it is a judgment call. If the tank is more than four or five years old and has never been opened, the odds are good you will want one, and a rod costs less than a wasted Saturday. If you are in a low-ceiling basement, buy a flexible segmented rod rather than a rigid one — it goes in as linked sections, so it does not need a clear metre of headroom above the tank.
The whole sequence is below, with the time each step actually takes and the thing most likely to go sideways. Read it once before you start anything.
One piece of insurance first: make sure you know where the main water shutoff for the house is before you open anything. It is the difference between a mistake and a flood, and if you have ever come home to a wet basement it is also the argument for an automatic shutoff valve.
The order matters more than the speed. Shutting the heat off comes first, then the cooling wait, then the water. GSW's Canadian manual sets out the same sequence for its gas tanks: turn off the electrical supply, turn off the gas at the main shut-off valve, "open a hot water faucet and let the hot water run until it is cool," connect a hose, close the cold-water inlet, and only then open the drain valve.
One habit worth building: leave a hot tap open somewhere in the house for the whole drain. It lets air into the system as the water leaves, and a tank that cannot draw air drains at a trickle or not at all.
When the tank is empty, do not stop there — that is draining, not flushing. Briefly reopen the cold supply with the drain valve still open, so a rush of fresh water stirs up the crust at the bottom and carries it out. Repeat that until what comes out of the hose runs clear rather than milky or gritty. It is the difference between removing the water and removing the sediment.
Why bother at all is a fair question, and York Region answers it neatly from the utility side. Municipal water is often treated with iron sequestration to stop iron staining fixtures, but as the Region explains, that treatment breaks down when the water is heated in a hot water tank, dropping the iron out to settle at the bottom. It is more common in tanks that run hot and are used lightly. Draining and flushing regularly is what keeps that out of your plumbing.
The whole sequence is below, with the time each step actually takes and the thing most likely to go sideways. Read it once before you start anything.
One piece of insurance first: make sure you know where the main water shutoff for the house is before you open anything. It is the difference between a mistake and a flood, and if you have ever come home to a wet basement it is also the argument for an automatic shutoff valve.
The order matters more than the speed. Shutting the heat off comes first, then the cooling wait, then the water. GSW's Canadian manual sets out the same sequence for its gas tanks: turn off the electrical supply, turn off the gas at the main shut-off valve, "open a hot water faucet and let the hot water run until it is cool," connect a hose, close the cold-water inlet, and only then open the drain valve.
One habit worth building: leave a hot tap open somewhere in the house for the whole drain. It lets air into the system as the water leaves, and a tank that cannot draw air drains at a trickle or not at all.
When the tank is empty, do not stop there — that is draining, not flushing. Briefly reopen the cold supply with the drain valve still open, so a rush of fresh water stirs up the crust at the bottom and carries it out. Repeat that until what comes out of the hose runs clear rather than milky or gritty. It is the difference between removing the water and removing the sediment.
Why bother at all is a fair question, and York Region answers it neatly from the utility side. Municipal water is often treated with iron sequestration to stop iron staining fixtures, but as the Region explains, that treatment breaks down when the water is heated in a hot water tank, dropping the iron out to settle at the bottom. It is more common in tanks that run hot and are used lightly. Draining and flushing regularly is what keeps that out of your plumbing.
This is the part people skip, and it is the part that decides how long the tank lives.
A steel tank sitting full of water wants to rust. The anode rod — a length of magnesium, aluminum, or zinc alloy threaded into the top of the tank — corrodes preferentially so the steel does not. It is designed to be consumed. Once it is consumed, nothing is protecting the tank, and the countdown to a leak starts.
You do not need to drain the tank completely to check it. A. O. Smith's maintenance guidance distinguishes the two jobs cleanly: let a few gallons drain when you are checking the anode rod, or let all of it out when you are draining or flushing. Since you are doing both today, the flush handles the draining and the rod comes out of an already-empty tank.
A healthy rod is smooth and roughly half an inch across. A spent one looks like a thin wire with lumps clinging to it, or like a stack of coins welded crookedly together. Two thresholds, from two manufacturers, are worth holding in your head.
A. O. Smith's test is visual: replace the rod if it shows signs of deterioration or has several inches of exposed core wire. Bradford White gives you a number instead — replace the anode when its diameter is 3/8 of an inch, or every other year, whichever comes first. Roughly a centimetre thick, in other words. If you are between the two, replace it; a rod costs a fraction of a tank.
The manufacturers also disagree about tools, and the disagreement is worth knowing rather than guessing at. A. O. Smith's consumer guidance suggests an electric impact wrench with a deep well socket. Bradford White's manual says, in plain capitals, to remove the anode using a socket of the appropriate size and to not use an impact wrench. When two manufacturers contradict each other, follow the manual for the tank you actually own — it is the document your warranty is written against. If you have no manual and no strong view, start with a breaker bar and human leverage. You can always escalate.
Two problems show up here, and they are unrelated.
The first is torque. A rod that has been in place for eight years is effectively welded in by thread corrosion. Use a long breaker bar, brace the tank so it cannot rotate, and apply steady pressure rather than shock. Penetrating oil on the threads and twenty minutes of waiting does more than brute force.
The second is headroom. Canadian basements are not generous, and a rigid anode rod is about as long as the tank is tall, which means you need that much clear space above it to lift the old one out. There are two answers. A. O. Smith's manual describes the field expedient: where the space above the heater is limited, pull up part of the rod, cut it off, and repeat until it is out. And for the replacement, a segmented rod is built for exactly this — it flexes into the tank in short linked sections. Wrap the threads of the new rod with sealant tape, start it by hand to be certain it is not cross-threaded, then tighten it properly.
Softened water is the accelerant to watch for. If your softener has been quietly over-regenerating or running on the wrong hardness setting, the anode rod pays for it before anything else in the house does, so the signs that a softener needs attention are worth learning alongside this job.
This is the part people skip, and it is the part that decides how long the tank lives.
A steel tank sitting full of water wants to rust. The anode rod — a length of magnesium, aluminum, or zinc alloy threaded into the top of the tank — corrodes preferentially so the steel does not. It is designed to be consumed. Once it is consumed, nothing is protecting the tank, and the countdown to a leak starts.
You do not need to drain the tank completely to check it. A. O. Smith's maintenance guidance distinguishes the two jobs cleanly: let a few gallons drain when you are checking the anode rod, or let all of it out when you are draining or flushing. Since you are doing both today, the flush handles the draining and the rod comes out of an already-empty tank.
A healthy rod is smooth and roughly half an inch across. A spent one looks like a thin wire with lumps clinging to it, or like a stack of coins welded crookedly together. Two thresholds, from two manufacturers, are worth holding in your head.
A. O. Smith's test is visual: replace the rod if it shows signs of deterioration or has several inches of exposed core wire. Bradford White gives you a number instead — replace the anode when its diameter is 3/8 of an inch, or every other year, whichever comes first. Roughly a centimetre thick, in other words. If you are between the two, replace it; a rod costs a fraction of a tank.
The manufacturers also disagree about tools, and the disagreement is worth knowing rather than guessing at. A. O. Smith's consumer guidance suggests an electric impact wrench with a deep well socket. Bradford White's manual says, in plain capitals, to remove the anode using a socket of the appropriate size and to not use an impact wrench. When two manufacturers contradict each other, follow the manual for the tank you actually own — it is the document your warranty is written against. If you have no manual and no strong view, start with a breaker bar and human leverage. You can always escalate.
Two problems show up here, and they are unrelated.
The first is torque. A rod that has been in place for eight years is effectively welded in by thread corrosion. Use a long breaker bar, brace the tank so it cannot rotate, and apply steady pressure rather than shock. Penetrating oil on the threads and twenty minutes of waiting does more than brute force.
The second is headroom. Canadian basements are not generous, and a rigid anode rod is about as long as the tank is tall, which means you need that much clear space above it to lift the old one out. There are two answers. A. O. Smith's manual describes the field expedient: where the space above the heater is limited, pull up part of the rod, cut it off, and repeat until it is out. And for the replacement, a segmented rod is built for exactly this — it flexes into the tank in short linked sections. Wrap the threads of the new rod with sealant tape, start it by hand to be certain it is not cross-threaded, then tighten it properly.
Softened water is the accelerant to watch for. If your softener has been quietly over-regenerating or running on the wrong hardness setting, the anode rod pays for it before anything else in the house does, so the signs that a softener needs attention are worth learning alongside this job.
If you use a softener, check the rod more often than the manual says. Every manufacturer in this guide warns that softened water consumes anode rods faster — the same chemistry that protects your kettle eats the rod.
Most of the trouble in this project comes from four places, and all four are manageable if you see them coming.
The drain valve will not reseal. Cheap plastic drain valves collect grit on the seat, and after a flush they weep steadily. This is the single most common bad outcome. The fix is to replace the valve with a brass one, or, as a stopgap, to thread a hose cap onto the spigot so it cannot drip. Do the replacement while the tank is already empty, not next weekend.
The drain valve clogs. Sediment can block the valve entirely, and the flow simply stops. Closing and reopening the valve, or briefly turning the cold supply back on to stir the tank, usually clears it. If it does not, A. O. Smith's guidance is the sensible one: call a plumber rather than escalating, because the next step involves removing the valve from a full tank.
There is no shutoff on the cold line. Older installations sometimes have none. Close the main shutoff for the house instead, and add a valve to the cold inlet while you are down there — it turns every future version of this job from an event into a chore.
The electric element burns out on refill. This one is permanent and entirely avoidable. On an electric tank, the tank must be completely full before you restore power, because an element that fires in air destroys itself in seconds. Refill, open every hot tap until the water runs in a steady stream with no sputtering, and only then go back to the breaker panel.
You will see American manuals and consumer pages advise setting the tank to 120°F (49°C) to reduce scald risk. Do not do that here, and it is worth understanding why.
Canadian public health guidance splits the number in two. The Public Health Agency of Canada advises setting the water heater itself to 60°C (140°F) to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria such as Legionella, and then preventing scalds with automatic mixing valves on faucets, showers, and tubs — or an anti-scald mixing valve on the heater — set to deliver water at 49°C (120°F). Hot in the tank, tempered at the tap.
The scald risk is not theoretical, which is why the tempering half matters. A. O. Smith's own manual publishes the time-to-burn table: water at 49°C takes more than five minutes to produce a serious burn, at 54°C about thirty seconds, and at 60°C less than five seconds. A child's skin burns in a quarter of the time an adult's does. If your tank runs at 60°C and you have no mixing valve, that is a conversation worth having with a plumber — separately from today's job.
Most of the trouble in this project comes from four places, and all four are manageable if you see them coming.
The drain valve will not reseal. Cheap plastic drain valves collect grit on the seat, and after a flush they weep steadily. This is the single most common bad outcome. The fix is to replace the valve with a brass one, or, as a stopgap, to thread a hose cap onto the spigot so it cannot drip. Do the replacement while the tank is already empty, not next weekend.
The drain valve clogs. Sediment can block the valve entirely, and the flow simply stops. Closing and reopening the valve, or briefly turning the cold supply back on to stir the tank, usually clears it. If it does not, A. O. Smith's guidance is the sensible one: call a plumber rather than escalating, because the next step involves removing the valve from a full tank.
There is no shutoff on the cold line. Older installations sometimes have none. Close the main shutoff for the house instead, and add a valve to the cold inlet while you are down there — it turns every future version of this job from an event into a chore.
The electric element burns out on refill. This one is permanent and entirely avoidable. On an electric tank, the tank must be completely full before you restore power, because an element that fires in air destroys itself in seconds. Refill, open every hot tap until the water runs in a steady stream with no sputtering, and only then go back to the breaker panel.
You will see American manuals and consumer pages advise setting the tank to 120°F (49°C) to reduce scald risk. Do not do that here, and it is worth understanding why.
Canadian public health guidance splits the number in two. The Public Health Agency of Canada advises setting the water heater itself to 60°C (140°F) to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria such as Legionella, and then preventing scalds with automatic mixing valves on faucets, showers, and tubs — or an anti-scald mixing valve on the heater — set to deliver water at 49°C (120°F). Hot in the tank, tempered at the tap.
The scald risk is not theoretical, which is why the tempering half matters. A. O. Smith's own manual publishes the time-to-burn table: water at 49°C takes more than five minutes to produce a serious burn, at 54°C about thirty seconds, and at 60°C less than five seconds. A child's skin burns in a quarter of the time an adult's does. If your tank runs at 60°C and you have no mixing valve, that is a conversation worth having with a plumber — separately from today's job.
Never drain a tank that is still hot. Water at tank temperature causes severe burns instantly, and it will soften a garden hose. Shut the heat off and give it hours, not minutes.
Here is where the manufacturers genuinely disagree, and where a Canadian answer differs from an American one.
A. O. Smith's manual says to drain and flush the tank and inspect the anode after the first six months of operation and at least annually thereafter. GSW, whose tanks are sold across Canada under the GSW and John Wood names, is more aggressive: it recommends the tank be drained and flushed every 6 months to remove sediment. Bradford White's manuals range from annual inspection to every two years depending on the model.
The variable none of them can set for you is your water. Hardness — dissolved calcium and magnesium — is what becomes sediment once it is heated. Health Canada is direct about the mechanism: the aesthetic concerns around hardness come from the tendency of those minerals to precipitate out of solution and form scale inside hot water–bearing pipes and water heating appliances. There is no health-based limit for hardness, but the federal guidance notes that supplies above 200 mg/L are considered poor, and that 80 to 100 mg/L strikes an acceptable balance between corrosion and scale.
So the honest flush interval is a function of where you live. These figures come from each municipality's own published water-quality reporting, measured as milligrams per litre of calcium carbonate.
The most useful thing in that table is not any single number — it is that two of those rows are the same city. Calgary draws from two rivers through two plants, and the City reports that northern neighbourhoods are served from the Bearspaw plant on the Bow while the south is served from Glenmore on the Elbow, with the southern numbers running consistently higher. A household in the south can sit above that 200 mg/L line for most of the year while a household in the north does not.
Ottawa is the starker version of the same point. The City's central supply is about 30 mg/L of total hardness, which it calls very soft — but its municipal well systems run from 200 up to 350 mg/L, because groundwater picks up minerals the rivers never see. Same city, same bylaws, more than a tenfold difference in what is landing in the bottom of your tank. If you are on a well system anywhere in Canada, assume hard and flush twice a year.
And if you would rather not look up a report at all, your house will tell you. Scale on the kettle element, spotting on the shower glass, soap that will not lather — the visible signs of hard water are reliable enough to set a flush interval by.
There is a point where this afternoon stops being maintenance and starts being a delaying tactic, and it is worth checking before you start rather than after.
Find the rating plate on the side of the tank and read the serial number. Every manufacturer encodes the build date differently, so you need your own brand's key. Bradford White's is one of the simpler ones: the first two characters of the serial number give the year and month of manufacture, running through a letter table where, for instance, S is 2018, T is 2019, W is 2020, and Y is 2022. Rheem publishes a lookup tool instead of a table. A. O. Smith uses the first digits of the serial number for the date.
Once you know the age, the decision gets simpler. A tank in its first decade is worth maintaining, and maintaining it is often a warranty condition rather than a nicety — GSW's manual states that the heater is warranted only when installed, operated, and maintained according to its printed instructions, and warns specifically that operating without a functioning anode rod will void any warranty. If you have never checked the rod on a six-year-old tank, that is a reason to do it today, not a reason to skip it.
But if the tank is past twelve or fifteen years, already weeping at a seam, or the anode came out looking like a bare wire on a unit that also has rust-coloured water, you are maintaining an appliance that is telling you it is finished. Spend the Saturday getting quotes instead. And if you are in that position and someone shows up unannounced offering to inspect or replace it, be careful — Consumer Protection Ontario's guidance on door-to-door sales of water heaters is worth reading first, and it is unambiguous that you should not rely on a salesperson's opinion that your water heater is unsafe.
That is also the moment to ask whether a tank is still the right answer for your house at all, rather than defaulting to another one — tankless comes with its own Canadian trade-offs around sizing, venting and cold incoming water.
The quiet reward for doing this well is that nothing happens. No rumble, no lukewarm showers in February, no puddle. You will have spent an afternoon and about thirty dollars, and bought yourself years of not thinking about the thing in the corner of the basement. That is what good maintenance looks like — boring, and entirely on your terms.
About the Author
Ryan is the founder of Homeowner.ca and a proud Canadian homeowner based in Guelph, Ontario. Over his 25-year career in digital publishing, he has focused on transforming complex information into clear, practical guidance that helps people make confident, well-informed decisions.
About two hours of hands-on work, plus two to four hours beforehand for the water to cool. Draining and flushing is roughly thirty to fifty minutes of that; the anode rod is ten minutes if it comes out easily and half an hour if it does not.
No. Standard rental agreements prohibit anyone not authorized by the provider from servicing the unit, and doing it yourself risks both your coverage and your liability if something leaks. Call the provider and ask them to flush it — and ask specifically whether flushing is covered under your rate, because on many contracts it is not.
Look for a company sticker or metal tag on the tank, then check your monthly utility or home-services bill for a rental line item. If you bought the house recently, the rental contract should have come up on closing, and the agreement itself will be in your purchase documents.
A 1-1/16 in. deep well socket with a long extension bar fits the standard residential anode hex. You will also want a breaker bar or long-handled ratchet, because leverage is what gets a seized rod moving.
Two tests. Replace it if several inches of the bare steel core wire are showing through the surrounding metal, or if the rod has worn from its original half-inch down to about 3/8 of an inch — roughly a centimetre. If it looks like a lumpy wire rather than a smooth rod, it is spent.
Pull up as much of the old rod as the space allows, cut it off, and repeat until it is out. Replace it with a flexible segmented rod, which enters the tank as short linked sections and needs almost no headroom.
Annually in soft-water cities like Vancouver, Halifax, Ottawa's central supply, and Toronto. Every six months if your hardness runs above about 200 mg/L — much of Regina, southern Calgary, Waterloo Region, and anywhere on groundwater wells.
Use the VACATION or PILOT setting on the gas control rather than OFF. It stops the burner from firing on an empty tank without extinguishing the pilot, which saves you relighting it afterward. On an electric tank, switch the breaker off — and leave it off until the tank is completely refilled.
Canadian public health guidance is 60°C in the tank to suppress Legionella, with mixing valves at the fixtures set to deliver 49°C. Do not simply lower the tank to 49°C on the advice of an American manual; add tempering at the taps instead.
Probably not — grit on the valve seat is the usual cause and it is very common after a first flush. Replace the plastic valve with a brass one while the tank is still empty, or thread a hose cap onto the spigot as a temporary stop.
