Advice to Customers on Water Heater Dip Tubes
The various articles on water heater dip tube deterioration which have appeared in Opflow during the last year
have been both interesting and helpful to me in my side duty of answering
customer complaints which our Customer Service Department have referred to
our lab. Prior to becoming aware of this phenomenon I probably
issued an unnecessary line flush work order or two in a n attempt to clear
a customer's line of these unknown crystals or particles.
Now when a customer complains of such particles
accumulating in his or her faucet aerators, I think dip tube first.
While your stories about infrared spectroscopic identification and a water
heater "autopsy" were quite interesting, in most cases a utility
will not have to to such lengths to confirm the cause of particle
accumulation.
I instruct the customer to remove the affected aerator,
clean it, flush the line in question for several minutes with cold water,
and reinstall the aerator. At that point the customer should then
determine if the accumulation occurs only with hot water. In most
cases I don't hear from the customer again, indicating the hot water
heater was in fact the cause of the problem and not our incoming
water. It is also helpful to have the customer check to see if a
neighbor is experiencing the same problem. Sometimes they already
have, and usually the neighbor is not having a problem. This again
points toward the hot water heater as the culprit.
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