Your experience of turning on the faucet and being rewarded with hot water is a daily luxury you probably take for granted. When the taps yield no heat, it’s easy to assume that there is a problem with the water heater. In this case study, the innocent tankless water heater is the victim of another appliance’s downfall.
Everybody knows the water in this town is very hard, so water softeners are very common. For tankless water heaters, a softener is pretty much mandatory to prevent lime from clogging them up. Unfortunately, the water softener can fail, and when it does, the problem can disguise itself. The softener’s resin tank let go, and the zeolite – tiny little rubbery plastic beads – was released into the home’s plumbing, which clogged up the water heater.
If you think about how a tankless water heater works, you can imagine how little tiny obstructions make a big problem. While a conventional tank has a heat exchanger in the middle of a large volume of water, the tankless water heater works on a different principle. Otherwise known as an on-demand water heater, the tankless water heater warms up cold water as it flows through multiple tiny conduits in the heat exchanger. If those conduits are blocked by a failed softener’s zeolite, you won’t get any hot water.
While some technicians will rush into a no-hot water situation trying to find the problem with the water heater, Afterglow’s technicians take a broad view and approach problems systematically. The homeowner in this situation was lucky to have someone patient, experienced, and smart to diagnose and solve the problem. Call Afterglow when you have a problem and you want to get lucky.