Repairing a Broken Water Heater Drain Plug
Dave SolbergA broken water heater drain plug on your RV can be a hassle to repair, depending whether your plug is metal or plastic. In this free video, Dave Solberg teaches you a couple quick solutions for removing a corroded or broken plug from the exterior of your RV’s water heater. You’ll learn how to diagnosis your particular issue, and discover the simplest way to fix and replace the drain plug and get back to enjoying clean hot water!
We received the question, from one of our members, that their water heater drain plug broke. Now I'm assuming it's the plastic style. There's a couple of different models. We've got Suburban and Atwood. This unit here is where the water heater is at.
It's got an access panel. Most of them will come off or just swing down. Now the drain plug on this one is down at the bottom here. And this one happens to be a metal drain plug. Typically, that means it's going to have an anode rod inside of it.
Now the stainless steel tanks act as an anode rod in the other models of it. This one actually has a rod in it. So some of the chemicals inside attack that rod and is kind of sacrificial. Uh. If it's the metal plug like this and that has broken off, then you pretty much gonna have to remove the water heater and tap that whole thing out.
Drill a hole in it and get a tap. That's a pretty major expense. Hopefully it's just the plastic plug and with the plastic plug, there's nothing behind it. So if that plug broke out, you pretty much just have a plastic threaded piece in there and you can do one of two things; you can take a drill, a series of small holes create a little bit of a slot and try to put a large flat head screwdriver in and pull it out. If that doesn't work, then I would just suggest drilling a hole and just getting a little bit bigger each time to kind of get those plastic thing out of there.
And then just start cutting and pulling that plastic out. Once you do that though, you wanna really flush that water heater after you do it. Make sure you'd have no plastic fillings inside that water heater, but you should be able to get in and just kind of work that out again. If it's the metal kind, probably looking at taking the unit out and getting it fixed at a repair facility.
How about a leaking water heater from the drain with a metal plug with the anode. I have Teflon taped mine a couple of times but it still leaks. It’s almost acting as if I have a bad weld at the fitting. If so, is that repairable? Thnx, G
first thing I did was get rid of plastic drain plug. Installed short galvanized nipple and connecter a short steel braided toilet supply line with a shut off. Makes for easy draining and gets the water out of the cabinet space. And no more drain plug.
My drain plug is leaking proficiently on my hot water heater in my rv
Rather than risk damaging the threads on the tank when removing a stubborn plastic drain plug, I have found that drilling out the center of the plastic plug and heating an old screwdriver with a propane torch works well. Laying the hot screwdriver against the drilled out hole quickly melts the remaining plastic plug down to the metal tank threads without damaging the metal threads. At that point it is relatively easy to pry the plastic plug loose for removal.
When this happened on my plastic plug, I heated a 1/2" socket extension, melted it into the plastic hole, cooled and turned out the plug.
We bought a camper with a broken plastic plug , I used an easy out for pipes it came out very easy. The people had tried to pound in a big screwdriver but that didn't work.
My unit is a 2017. At first I had plenty of hot water but now, not so much. With out spending money that I don’t have, how can I get more hot water coming out. Thank you Ben Out.
Water heater rods