Water Heater Care
Installation, descaling and warranty-friendly repairs for instant and storage heaters — done in a way that keeps the manufacturer warranty intact.
Water heaters fail loudly when they fail badly. The good news is that almost every failure mode advertises itself early — a faint hiss, a slow trip on the breaker, a stain under the unit — and a 45-minute service visit can prevent the kind of incident that takes out a ceiling.
What we work on
- Instant electric heaters of all common brands
- Storage tank heaters from 25 L through 100 L, vertical and horizontal
- Solar pre-heater systems with electric back-up
- Multipoint heaters serving more than one outlet
New installation
We treat every new install as a small project, not a quick swap. The visit starts with checking the existing inlet pressure, the wall substrate, the breaker rating and the available drain line for the safety valve. If anything is borderline, we tell you on the spot — installing a 9 kW heater on a 30 A breaker is a fire hazard waiting for a long shower.
The fixings we use are chemical anchors on hollow walls, expansion bolts on solid concrete. The water connections are flexible hoses rated for the heater's working pressure, not generic supply hoses. The drain line for the pressure-relief valve runs to the nearest floor trap, never into a bucket "for now".
Annual service
For storage heaters, the annual service is genuinely worth booking. We isolate the unit, flush the tank, inspect and replace the sacrificial magnesium anode if it is more than 60 percent depleted, and pressure-test the safety valve. Skipping the anode check is the most common reason a tank rusts through inside its warranty window — and rusted-through tanks are not under any warranty.
For instant heaters, the annual visit is shorter — a cartridge filter clean, a check on the heating element resistance, a torque check on the inlet and outlet connections. About 30 minutes per unit.
Repair work
Common faults we handle in a single visit:
- Heating element failure — replacement with a matched OEM part
- Thermostat drift or no-trip — replacement and re-calibration
- Solenoid valve sticking open in instant heaters
- Pressure-relief valve weep — replacement only, never plugged
- Inlet or outlet hose failure — replaced as a pair
If the diagnosis points to the unit itself being beyond economic repair — common for tanks more than ten years old, or for instant heaters whose internal control board has burned — we will say so plainly, quote a replacement, and credit the diagnostic visit against the new install.
Warranty handling
Manufacturer warranty claims fall apart when the original installation paperwork is missing or when an unauthorised hand has touched the unit. We log every service we do against your unit's serial number and keep the file ourselves, so when something does need a warranty replacement we can hand the manufacturer everything they need on day one.