KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Audio Showings- What To Know About Water Heaters

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

And welcome to another edition of the Nerdy Agent podcast Audio Showing of the week. Audio, audio show. I still think that we're working on our intro for this one. We need AJ to sing with me. AJ disappeared. It was so quiet. I'm not sure if she moved the camera, but if not AJ's here in spirit. Today we are going to talk about water heaters and what you should be looking at when you're in the basement,

looking at these water heaters, what you should teach to your buyers about them. Do you want me to kick it off? I can kick it off. What's the first thing you tell about water heater? More broadly speaking, mechanicals are a big deal, right? And it's something that, at least when I was going through the buy-in process, before I became an agent, I was constantly frustrated by the fact that no one ever talked. I was constantly.

After the fact, it was very frustrated that no one ever really talked to me about them until I started working with AJ when he got his license. Because people ignore what are relatively big-ticket items. Now, the water heater is the least expensive of the mechanical systems that could go wrong in your house, but it could also become a very expensive problem if it does go wrong. So I tell people we go downstairs, the water heater is around $1,500 to $1,500 to replace. There is an actual sticker on the water heater, which makes it a lot easier to get the age of than the furnace or the air conditioner

because it literally says 2012 or 2020, whatever that date is. So you can look at that sticker on 98% of them and you can figure out what the age of that is. On top of that, the water heater does tend to, to rust over time. So really old ones you will see have rust and corrosion on them. Sometimes newer ones will get rust and corrosion on them and that's a sign that it's probably not going to last as long. And so you're kind of monitoring those two things. The one big thing I leave my buyers with though is that like a furnace or an air conditioner, when they go out, you lose heat, you lose cool. So even if a furnace goes out in the winter, you can buy space

heaters, you can keep your house warm enough. So I usually tell them I would let ACs run out. I would let furnaces run out their life because some of them go a lot longer than others. You just don't know exactly when they're going to go. With a water heater, if it looks like it's really old and it's rusted out and it's getting close to the point where it's going to go, you want to replace it before it actually goes because essentially if you've ever seen this, but when a water hiter goes bad, the bottom russes out and the water, you know, you get, if a 40 gallon is going to drop 40 gallons of water of hot water all over your basement. So if you've an unfinished basement, not as big of a deal, but still a deal, but if you have a finished basement, it will destroy things.

I actually tell people if you have an unfinished basement and you do have like a decent floor drain within distance of it, I would be way more likely to just run that sucker into the ground because it's just going to drain into the end of the floor drain anyways. Yeah. It's just, but like, for $1,800, it's more like, yeah, you be in also maybe test the CO on it too. Make sure it's not kicking off any carbon monotry. Sure. But if it's, but if it is behind a wall and carpets on the other side of that wall, you don't want to do it. No, you're, I'm far more like.

likely you just want to swap that thing pretty quick. The other thing I just want to mention, they last about 10 to 15 years. The inspector would tell you, we've seen them last a lot longer than that. I've seen them last a lot less than that as well. They have different warranties on them too. A lot of them have stickers. It's like, this is a six year water heater. This is a nine year water heater. So based on the sticker too, you can be like, this one's better and more expensive than that one was. So it'll probably last you a little bit longer. But if it's 10, 12 years old, you're saying it's getting close to end of life. So keep a close eye on this because it could create massive problems for you.

And then just two more points on there. If you are wondering where you look for rust on these water heaters, I'm always looking at the bottom to see if there's any water drops around if it's leaking actively. And then the connection at the top is typically where you're going to see the rust and corrosion. If it's pretty bad there, that's when you start to get pretty concerned. Even if it's a two-year-old water heater, you should still check that because I've seen two, three-year-old water heaters and they're rusted to crap. And that's going to go out pretty soon and that connection needs to be replaced. The other thing I was looking at is just the water intake and out.

So is it copper? Is it pecks? Is it potentially galvanized water lines just so you know that they're there in the house or not? Yep.