Water heater and fixture installation

Replacing a water heater that's leaking or past its useful life (roughly 10 to 12 years for a standard tank) is routine work, but in older housing stock the pressure drop often starts further upstream, in galvanized pipe. We check both before proposing a straight tank swap.

Fixtures in houses built before the 1980s frequently have shutoff valves that no longer turn, corroded stuck open. We replace them with quarter-turn valves any time we're already changing a faucet, sink or toilet, so the next repair doesn't start with a whole-house shutoff.

On request, we also install tankless water heaters for basement renovations where space is tight, sized to what the existing pipe can actually deliver rather than the nameplate number.

A water heater's age is on the manufacturer's label on the tank, not just "we've had it a while." A manufacture date at or past 10 to 12 years, combined with rust at the base or a weeping pressure-relief valve, points to a tank near the end of its life. A repair — swapping an element or a valve — still makes sense on a tank under 8 years old; past that, the risk of the tank itself leaking within months makes replacement more sensible than a part changed on a tank that's going to fail anyway.

Replacing a standard tank, supplied and installed, runs roughly $1,400 to $2,400, and the final price mostly depends on the existing venting — a flue shared with the furnace costs more to tie into than a direct vent — and on access to the spot. In post-war West Island bungalows the water heater usually sits in an open mechanical room, while in an older duplex basement the tight space around the unit adds handling time.

Hooking a new water heater up to a service line that's still galvanized only solves part of the problem: the tank will deliver its full output, but the water still has to travel through the section narrowed by corrosion before it reaches the tap. We always flag this before proposing a water-heater-only swap, so the client isn't disappointed by pressure that stays weak despite a brand-new unit.

A tankless water heater needs a dedicated vent and, on a gas line, sometimes a larger gas meter — two things to check before confirming a price, since neither is ever the same from one house to the next. The conversion costs more than a straight tank swap, but it frees up the floor space the old tank used to take, a real gain in a basement being finished for living space.

When the flue shared with the furnace is no longer enough to safely vent a gas water heater — often the case once the furnace itself has been replaced with a high-efficiency model that no longer uses that flue — a power-vent unit becomes necessary. It costs more up front, but it lets the water heater sit away from an exterior wall and avoids redoing the whole chimney.

A water heater installed behind a backflow preventer on the water service — increasingly common with recent replacements — needs an expansion tank to absorb the pressure created by water heating inside a closed system. We check for this every time we do a replacement, because a closed system without an expansion tank wears out the pressure-relief valve early and can leave it weeping continuously.

Draining the tank once a year and checking the sacrificial anode after the warranty period can push the useful life past the 10-to-12-year average, but few homeowners actually do it in practice — a tank that's never maintained rarely makes it to 15 years.