00:00The tap makes that hollow hiss and then nothing. Not low pressure. Nothing. Kitchen. Bathroom.
00:05The hose bib on the side of the house. Same dry click. Your water heater does not care. It is
00:11sitting in the closet or the basement or the garage holding about 40 gallons of city water
00:15that was already in there before the main broke, before the boil noticed, before the pump station
00:19went dark. That tank is not a heater right now. It is a sealed jug. Do four things in the
00:24right
00:24order and you can drink from it tonight. I have done this on my own tank. I will never look
00:29at
00:29that grey cylinder the same way again. The order is the whole video because the backwards
00:33version can crack the tank or replace your clean water with whatever is now in the street.
00:38Kill the heat first. Electric. The breaker that actually says water heater. Gas. The knob
00:44on the control goes to pilot, not all the way off. You are not relighting anything in the
00:48dark. You are making sure a heating element does not fire inside a tank you are about to
00:52empty. An electric element that turns on with no water around it is called dry firing. It
00:57can split the tank. It can start a fire. The power coming back on in two hours does not
01:02ask if you are finished. Close the cold inlet on top of the tank, second, clockwise until it stops.
01:08That valve is why this works. Leave it open and every gallon you pull from the bottom gets replaced
01:13by whatever is coming in from the street. If the city line is empty, full of silt from a break
01:18or
01:18under a contamination order, you just turned your 40 gallon reserve into 40 gallons of the problem.
01:23Close it. The clean water stays the clean water. Let air in third or the tank will refuse you.
01:28Open any hot faucet in the house. Upstairs is better. Or flip the little lever on the temperature and
01:34pressure valve on the side of the tank so it stands straight up. Stand to the side if you use
01:39that lever. It can spit. The tank is a closed bottle. Open the drain on a closed bottle and
01:45you get a vacuum and a sad trickle. Give it a path for air and it pours. Garden hose on
01:50the drain valve
01:50at the bottom, other end in a clean jug. Open the drain. The first quart looks like rust tea that
01:57is sediment on the floor of the tank. Minerals, mostly. Ugly. Let it go into a bucket you are not
02:02going to drink from, then switch to the containers you actually want. The water above that sludge is
02:08the same water that came out of your kitchen tap last Tuesday. Power. Inlet. Air. Drain. If those
02:14four words are all you have when the lights are out, you still get the water. Ready.gov's baseline
02:19is one gallon per person per day for drinking and sanitation. A 40 gallon tank is 10 days for a
02:24family of four if you are careful. One person living alone is looking at more than a month behind a
02:30closet door. The body gives you about three days without water before things get ugly. Less if it
02:35is hot and you are working. So the gap between and I own a water heater and I know which
02:40two valves to
02:41turn is the gap between three days and 10. Water utilities put this on their own emergency pages.
02:4630 to 80 gallons depending on the tank. 40 and 50 are the common ones. Tankless is the exception and
02:52it is a mean one. If you swapped to tankless for the power bill, you also deleted the reservoir.
02:57A tankless unit heats what passes through. There is no 40 gallons hiding in there. If that is your
03:02house, this is not your backup. Jugs are. Do not learn that during the outage. If you are still
03:08watching, you are the person this is for. Subscribe. It is free and it keeps the channel up. Members
03:14get the extra videos. Back to the drain because that little plastic valve is about to try to ruin
03:19the night. Most tanks ship with a plastic drain that takes a regular garden hose thread. It also
03:24snaps if you cross thread a metal fitting or lean on it like a hose bib. A broken drain on
03:29a full tank
03:29is not a cute problem. It is a basement flood in the middle of the thing you were trying to
03:33survive.
03:34Hand tighten the hose. If the valve already looks brittle and yellow, a brass replacement is 8 to 15
03:40dollars and it goes in the same hole. Do that on a Saturday while the water is on. Not at
03:44midnight
03:44under a boil notice. The stream may still be 120 degrees. Gloves. The tank has been keeping it there
03:50on purpose. Let it cool in the jugs if you can wait. If you cannot, use it for washing and
03:55cooking
03:55once it will not scald you. Water that sat warm in steel through. A long outage should get a boil
04:01or a
04:02proper disinfection pass before it goes in a glass. It was clean when it went in. Time and heat are
04:07what
04:07you're managing, not mystery sludge. Here is why the first quart is ugly and the rest is not. Cold
04:13city water does not dump into the top of the tank. A plastic dip tube carries it to the bottom
04:17on
04:18purpose, so it does not cool the hot water you actually use. Hot water is drawn off the top.
04:23Sediment lives where the cold lands. You're draining from the floor of the tank, so you meet the dirt first,
04:28then you get the good layer. That is not a broken heater. That is the design. 40 gallons of water
04:33weighs a little over 330 pounds. You're not moving the tank. You're sipping it. That is why it lives
04:40on a stand in the basement and why a snapped plastic valve is a much bigger night than it looks.
04:45Three mistakes empty the reserve while you watch, and a fourth one is just a bad idea.
04:50The water in there is dirty. I would never drink that. You have been bathing in it. You have been
04:55washing dishes in it. The rusty first quart is the bottom. Everything above it is municipal water
05:00that already went through the treatment plant. If the tap was safe this morning, the tank is that
05:05same water, sealed. I will just keep using the tap until it stops. If the problem is a broken main
05:12or
05:12contamination order, the tap is how the bad water enters the house. The first 10 minutes of an outage
05:17are a race. Fill the bathtub, fill the pots, then close the house main so nothing backs in, and close
05:23the
05:23heater inlet so the tank stays a jug. Those two twists can double what you have. They cost a walk
05:29to the valves. I will drink the toilet. The bowl is a no. Always. The tank behind the bowl is
05:36city
05:36water in a ceramic box, and only if you have never dropped in one of those blue cleaner tablets.
05:41If the tablet has been in there, skip it. You're not that thirsty yet. You have 40 gallons in the
05:46closet. I will take it from the pool. Pool water is for flushing and washing. The chemical load is the
05:52point of a pool. Same for the spa, the waterbed. The radiator, the little fountain in the yard.
05:58Ready dot. Gov lists the tank, the pipes, and the ice cubes. It does not list the deep end. The
06:04pipes.
06:05After you close the house main, open the highest faucet so air can get in, then collect from the
06:10lowest faucet or the outdoor bib. Gravity hands you whatever was sitting in the lines. Usually two to
06:15four gallons. Not a week. A morning. Next to the tank, it is the difference between cooking rice
06:21and not. The freezer. The ice bin is already clean water. It was keeping the food cold anyway. Melted.
06:27Do not throw it off the porch to save the chicken. The chicken is tomorrow. The ice is tonight.
06:32In February 2021, the Texas freeze took out power and water in the same week. Pipes burst.
06:37Boil notices went up. People melted snow on camp stoves. A huge number of those houses still had a
06:43full tank sitting on a stand in the garage, and a lot of the gas ones still had hot water
06:47in them even
06:47after the electric pumps died. The water was not the hard part. Knowing the inlet had to close first
06:52was the hard part. None of this replaces a real stored supply. The longer public health target is
06:58two weeks, which for four people is 56 gallons on purpose, not 50 gallons by accident. The tank is
07:04the bridge you already paid for. The jugs are the plan. Tonight is about not running dry on day two
07:09because nobody put a label on the bridge. The store version of this during a run is ugly. 40 gallons
07:14is
07:14about 10 of those 24 packs if the shelf still has them. In a panic, there are six to eight
07:19dollars a
07:20case when you can find them and you will not find them. Call it 60 to 80 dollars for water
07:24you already
07:24own sitting behind a foam jacket. The kit is a short garden hose that has never seen pesticide,
07:30a flathead screwdriver, gloves, and a few clean jugs. Under twenty dollars if you are starting from zero.
07:35Buy the hose? The one on the lawn is not what you want between the tank and your mouth.
07:40When city water comes back, reverse it in this order or you will buy a new heater. Close the drain.
07:45Open the cold inlet. Let the tank fill all the way. Open a hot faucet until the sputter stops so
07:50you
07:50know the tank is full and the air is gone. Then, and only then, flip the breaker or turn the
07:56gas back
07:56from pilot. Power into an empty tank is how a free emergency becomes an 800 to $1500 replacement.
08:04Four minutes of homework that does not need an emergency. Walk to the heater while the lights
08:08work. Finger on the cold inlet. Finger on the drain. Find the breaker or the gas knob. If the drain
08:13is
08:14plastic and crusty, order the brass one. Hang a short clean hose on a nail next to the tank. Write
08:19the
08:19four words on tape and stick it to the jacket. Power. Inlet. Air. Drain. If the taps are still running
08:25at your house tonight, you are not late. You are early. That is the only version of this that feels
08:30stupid in a good way.
08:32Thanks for watching. Send this to the person who would be in that basement with you. I will catch
08:36you in the next one.
08:37We'll catch you in the next one.
08:37The screen here is the drill.
08:37Steven Milcare Night of Corp area, a computer list of halten program.
08:37He is on the dialoku menu, anעל
