Simple Tips for RV Water Heater Maintenance

Water heaters have come a long way over the years from the old models that you had to come out and actually physically light a pilot light on the outside. Now, there are still a few of those types of water heaters that are in the very inexpensive travel trailers just because of the price point of them but most of them today are either six or 10 gallon electronic ignition. So they, they call 'em DSI, Direct Spark Ignition. All you have to do is turn on the heater water heater button on the inside. It will tell the module board to come in here and spark your igniter right here.

LP comes through this valve here and this is our burner assembly where the LP system this is the burner assembly, excuse me but this is where the LP will mix with the air. So there's a little bit of adjustment in here. This happens to be a six gallon Atwood water heater. They do have the upgrade in some of these models that would go to 10 gallon and it does LP or electric. A lot of people are not boon docking.

They wanna save their LP for other things in there like the stove, the refrigerator, the furnace which don't operate on electric and so if you're camped to the campground then they wanna meet, save a little bit of that LP. The difference between the Atwood and the Suburban is the Atwood has a stainless steel tank inside here and the suburban has on a drain plug over here it's got an anode rod just like you would have at home. It is just a magnesium rod that acts as a sacrificial rod for the bacteria, the chemicals that are inside and it will literally eat that so with the suburban model you need to take that anode rod out once a year and just do it when you're winterizing you're gonna drain this out anyway and just check that. You might have to replace it. With the Atwood version you don't have to.

There's not a whole lot of maintenance that is required on a water heater but there's some things that you need to know so that you don't have problems with it later on. The first thing is, is you need to winterize it. If you're gonna get into any cold weather you've got six gallons or 10 gallons of water sitting in this metal vessel in the inside here and if that freezes up that'll split that interior tank and you can replace the tank there's some people that have done that. It's fairly labor intensive. Sometimes it's more expensive to do that than it is just to replace the water heater.

The other thing that you need to do is to make sure if you have the electric version of this you wanna make sure that when you do winterize it and you take all the water out of this that in the spring when you fire it back up and you turn this thing on, you need water in it 'cause if you don't have water inside you heat it up, it gets too hot, it will literally ruin the water heater. So you wanna make sure you do that. Very easy to winterize. Most of these will have a diverter valve so that when you drain this, you can either fill it up with RV antifreeze or drain the entire system in here. But the diverter valve changes the water line so if you're gonna put RV antifreeze in you don't have to fill six gallons of RV antifreeze inside this.

You just drain this, turn that diverter valve drain this and then the water goes around it and it just, it just stays open. You know the other way to winterize is blowing the whole thing out with compressed air. Turn your compressor down to about 40 psi. You don't want a 100, 120 blasting the system out in here. The other couple things in here that you know just need to make sure that this is cleaned out inside that this little spark igniter is not cracked and you're getting carbon tracking out of it or the spark going away from the burner assembly and then right in here we have the thermostat.

We have an emergency cutoff switch. So the thermostat is basically designed just to and you can get a couple different temperatures. It comes preset with the factory temperature in it. You can go a little bit warmer in that. The idea is that you're probably up in about 130 140 degrees if I remember correctly and the hotter you can get the water the more you can mix cold with it because six gallons is pretty precious when you start looking at taking a shower, washing dishes, that type of stuff.

I know when we go camping, my granddaughters go out we probably need about a 50 gallon water tank for them to take the shower so they need to use the campground one. But the more you can conserve that water and the hotter you can get it in here, you know the longer it will go without having to recycle. The nice thing about these DSI water heaters is that it takes only about 10 minutes for them to heat the water up to temperature. Where it used to take a lot longer than that. So I don't have to have this on all the time because when you do that it's gonna fire up, it's gonna heat up the water it's shut off, water cools down, it'll fire up again heat the water and just so it keeps cycling it keeps using LP, it keeps using battery power so it is a pretty good, you know, recovery on this.

This type of system one thing that's unique about Winnebago is that they run what's called MotorAid around this water heater tank and they tap into the RV antifreeze, bring it back in here wrap it around the tank, and that antifreeze is running about 200 and you know how many degrees in there so it heats the water while you're driving down the road pretty much free. Now Aqua Hot does a similar thing with that. I don't know of any of the other manufacturers that do it themselves other than the Aqua Hot and aftermarket stuff and there are some other companies that are bringing some of this stuff into fruition. Now, one of the things you do see some manufacturers are starting to put in is the on-demand system because you use less water, less cycling but the on-demand systems like Lipper there've been a few others in I think Aqua Hot has one as well. You have to have a lot of power for those.

They take an enormous amount of electricity to get that to, you know, to work that way so, and I would never use one that was designed for a residents or a home use because it just can't stand the temperature changes can't stand the rigors of going down the road so just understanding a few things on winterizing starting it back up will help prevent some major problems with your water heater in the future.