What happens if you don’t service your tankless water heater?

If you neglect maintenance on your tankless heater, it will reduce the lifespan of your investment. You could go years without performing maintenance and the heater will still function. It won’t heat the water efficiently, but it will still produce hot water at a reduced flow rate.

Sometimes, the cleaning process could do more harm than good:

• If you go several years without servicing your water heater
• If you purchase a home that has a tankless heater and you are unsure when and how often the heater was last cleaned (questions you should ask and validate with receipts)

We have experience with 6- to 8-year-old heaters that had never been cleaned. After the cleaning process, the heater developed a series of leaks because the scale buildup that was invisible to the tech had become so significant that it made the pipe joints weak. Once removed, the scale had become the binding agent that was no longer present. When this happened, the homeowner had two choices: replace the heater exchanger (the most expensive heating element) or install a new heater.

At Earl’s Plumbing, our customer system allows us to enter in your tankless installation or tankless maintenance as a reoccurring service in order to send you a reminder. Also, the newest Navien NPE models will alert you when service is due.

There’s one last part to consider when it comes to maintenance intervals. You can extend the interval if your home is equipped with:

• A water softener
• A water conditioning system such as Aqua Sana (with a TAC, aka “Templated Assisted Crystallization”)
• The Navien Peak Flow tankless water heater

Homes with a water softener can typically go every 1.5 to 2 years between maintenance calls depending on the size of the family.