Much of West Tennessee runs moderately hard water — nothing scary, just mineral-rich. Your skin barely notices. Your water heater absolutely does, and it keeps the receipts.
What's happening inside the tank: dissolved minerals fall out of solution when water gets heated, and they settle as sediment on the bottom of the tank — right on top of a gas unit's burner, or burying an electric unit's lower element. The heater now has to heat THROUGH a growing rock layer. Efficiency drops, recovery slows, and the tank bottom runs hotter than it was designed to, which shortens its life.
The sound of sediment: popping, rumbling, or knocking when the heater runs. That's water flashing to steam underneath the sediment layer and bursting through it. A heater that's gone quiet-to-noisy is telling you the layer is thick.
The fix is unglamorous: drain some water out once a year. Hose on the drain valve at the bottom, run it to a floor drain or bucket, and let it carry the loose sediment out. It's a genuinely doable homeowner job on many units — but there are real cautions: the water comes out scalding hot, gas units have pilot/control settings that need to be set correctly before and after, and a drain valve that hasn't been opened in a decade sometimes doesn't want to close again. If any of that gives you pause, it's part of what we handle on a maintenance visit anyway.
Tankless owners don't get a pass — they get a different chore. Scale builds inside a tankless unit's heat exchanger, where it chokes flow and efficiency. The fix is an annual descaling flush with a pump and solution. Skip it for a few years and the "endless hot water" math quietly falls apart.
Signs you're past prevention: rusty or tea-colored HOT water (cold runs clear), moisture or weeping around the tank's base or seams, or a heater past the ten-year mark that's misbehaving. At that point, flushing won't rewind the clock — but an honest assessment beats a flooded garage. We'll tell you plainly which side of the line yours is on: (901) 699-7763.
