Scrapping out a full brine tank

[nova_robotics]

You're also supposed to flush the bottom of the water heater every spring. When the 50gallon water heater that was in the house when I bought it in 1996 finally died in 2009 or 10, there was no grunge in the bottom.

I replaced my water heater (still good at the time) with a gigantic 400L unit made out of 304 stainless and installed a magnesium anode. The water is insanely acidic around here. It's basically battery acid. Every garbage day you can see a hot water heater on the side of the road. Even with the crappy water around here, nobody and I mean nobody maintains their tanks. Nobody has even heard of changing an anode, and no one has ever flushed the tank. They just throw them out ever 6-8 years.

And the cooking with cold water is because the hot water leaches lead out of the old soldered pipes, or so I was told long, long ago, and far, far away. There is at least one advantage to plastic pipe, I guess.

Nope. The majority of water heaters come with aluminum anodes. The whole point of the sacrificial anode is for it to corrode preferentially and drop junk into the tank. Aluminum is a heavy metal and you do not want it in your body. Lots of badness there, mostly neurological stuff. You want to minimize your exposure to aluminum, and definitely don't want to be drinking the stuff.

Copper piping is one my pet peeves. That is basically an obsolete building material at this point. PEX is a superior material in nearly every way. The only places you should be using copper is in very high temperature applications (higher than normal potable water), and where there's a high rate of rodent infestation. In almost all other cases PEX is what you should be using. It blows the doors off of copper and in most cases has a much longer service life. Also CPVC sucks and the only reason it's still around is because it makes straight lines so plumbers can look like they did a good job. It's a garbage material.

When the cheapy 20gallon heater failed in 2017, I put in the cheapest tankless water heater I could find. It's flaking out now, but didn't get all the maintenance it was supposed to get.

I'm going to be putting up a new shop pretty soon and I think you're right about the tankless route. It's just too easy and makes a whole lot of sense, especially for low demand applications. Another thing I did was install a waste water heat recovery system. One of the best things I've ever done. It's dead easy and it just works. Install it inline of the drain on a shower and it pre-heats the water going into your hot water tank. My cold water supply into my hot water tank went from bone chilling to luke warm. It does about 1/3 of the work of the hot water tank, for free. Saving money is all well and good, but the biggest benefit I've noticed is that I can't outrun the hot water tank anymore. Since the heating element is only doing 2/3 of the work, the inlaws can come over and have as many showers as they want and we never run out of hot water. Previously three or four showers in a row and we'd be out of hot water. It's a great system and dead simple. It's just a pipe.