hi my name is Jerry McQueen this is for my emergency emerging technologies class we're gonna do a short video and my video today is going to show you how to clean out your hot water heater we have had problems with our hot water in the last couple weeks the hot water is not heating up enough to be able to take a full shower so obviously there's something wrong with our hot water hot water heater so I've done this before and we have very hard water because we're on a well system and we get a lot of lime deposits a lot of lime buildup inside of our hot water heater which causes the elements to go bad and which causes you to so the first thing you need to do is turn off your power supply you need to make sure that you do not have power going to because water and electricity do not mix so make sure that your breaker is off on your electrical panel shut that off second thing you need to do is to make sure that you even though you have your breaker turned off you need to make sure that the power supply to the hot water heaters is totally turned off so I've done this here I've taken off the panel and disconnected the electrical supply to the hot water heater so it's totally disconnected so I have no electricity whatsoever second thing you need to do is make sure that you have your water supply turned off so the water supply is turned off so I don't have water filling the tank after I have a drain okay so your hot water heater is made up of obviously your tank and this tank has two elements one here and one here and you can disconnect all your electrical connections to your element put your elements right here and then there's one down here so I've done that I've disconnected the electrical connections to both elements next thing you need to do is drain your hot water heater you gotta get rid of all that water that's in there you're gonna have a big mess so down at the bottom you should have a place where you can drain it and you want to go ahead and hook up a hose to that hook up your hose and make sure that your system is completely drained before you start working on it after your system is drained then you can go about taking out your elements I've already loosened mine these can be very very tight though so go ahead and take all your elements that's what your element looks like this one's I've already cleaned it up it had limescale all over it but this element is good it's so good and obviously that's not right the electricity runs to the rod here and each here hot water and our problem was this top element was working but the bottom element obviously was not working and we were only about 50% efficiency because this element was heating all the water and once the cold water would fill once you use the hot water we only we only had about this much hot water which we only had about a half a tank of water so obviously that's what the problem was what you're gonna get and one of the reasons why this went bad was because of all the lime scale buildup that was in the bottom of the tank and the line is just the mineral deposits that come that come from your your water which is really my arse is really hard we're on a well system and it's you just get a lot of lime buildup and what's that lime builds up and gets to your elements this is what's gonna happen so the next thing you need to do is clean out all your line that's in there and one good way to do that is to take shopback and to take a small piece of garden hose and cut a small piece of garden hose and attach it to the end of your shopback and just stick that in there and just suck out as much as you can of that lime skill once your your lime is all taken out of your system the only thing you got left to do is just put everything back together put your elements back in hook up all your electrical connections and then fill it up with hot water or filled up with water before you turn your electricity on you want to make sure that your tank is full before you turn the electricity on obviously because your elements will burn out if it doesn't have the water in there so pretty simple pretty easy if you're not comfortable with any electricity like electricity or if you're not familiar with plumbing call a licensed electrician and their plumber but this is something that the everyday handyman can do and it's not something that has to cost you you know two or three hundred dollars to have somebody come and do for it in the element cost about $15 and it's a lot of it's a lot of work it's not easy to do but it's something to do yourself so thanks for watching