I hope this is the beat place for my question. Should be an easy one for some. We built our house last year and this is the first well I have had. We lost commercial power last week for about 4 hours. I am planning a generator setup in the future. My question, after losing power I asked my wife and kids to no run any water unless nessesary to keep what water we had available in the pressure tank. Hours into this the need arose to flush a toilet. I had zero pressure in the bladder tank to refill the toilet. I figured I would use what was in the 80 gallon water heater to refill it. To my surprise i only got about a gallon from the drain of the heater tank. Im wondering why? Is it possible the water needed to be vented from an upper fixture to drain the tank? I didnt mess with it any further because the power came back on during this process.
Coulda opened a hot tap at the sink to prove that out. Got to be careful doing that tho if it's an electric heater....
plumbing, air in=water out, opening a faucet would accomplish this. Electric water heater, if you drain water out, leaving air at the top, exposing the top element and this element comes on it explodes. the elements must be submerged to work properly. so if you drain the water during an outage as soon as the power comes on the elements will turn on and overheat immediately and explode before the tank can fill up with water. if you have to drain some be sure to turnoff the breaker so the heater can not come back on until it is full.
Good info on the elements. I will surely shut off the breaker in the future. Any idea of why the pressure tank bled off? Is that normal?
toilet running, faucet dripping, leak somewhere. OR the bladder is bad in the tank OR no air pressure over bladder.
That electric heater is new? Just curious but what do you have for a heating system? My dinosaur (oil) burner has an indirect storage tank attached as a 4th zone. If the power is out, we still have the ultimate luxury, hot water, because it takes relatively little electricity to power the boiler. I'm going to massively oversize my bladder tank for 2 reasons, to reduce the cycle frequency of my well pump and to provide more reserve before I need to run the generator.
Sorry, Redfin, I got super busy at work.... But ironpony came thru! Must be a former Long Islander thing (both of us)
We have 1000 gallons stored, slightly uphill from the house. It will adequately gravity feed into the house when the power is off.
Redfin, first Iron Pony and others are masters.. I am just a make it work rookie... where I live storms cause power loss.. yes I got a generator but I got to pull it out its old and play with carb to make it work.. so if I see a storm coming I just fill a tub halfway with water.. then if you need to flush.. pull tank off top of toilet fill 2 gallon bucket from tub and pour into top of tank and flush away.. cost if I don't use it 10 cents for power..maybe.. my freezer set at 0 will keep stuff frozen in basement 4 hours easy IF you keep door shut... Could be I am just lazy no I got too much to do yeah that sounds better!
Valve off the house, and see if it still leaks down. Could be a bad check valve or foot valve in the pump if there is no check in your system.
x2 kind of... I put a full bucket by each toilet and I get a couple pitchers of drinking water ready. To flush the toilet I just dump half a bucket right into the toilet, no need to go through the basin. During the day the genny is running so only a night time thing. We lasted 2 years without generator setup, but when the first baby came along it was impractical to tough it out for a few days. Worst storm was 4 days in the dead of winter - wood stove and genny made us very appreciative, especially when my neighbors house dropped into the 30s! We did not get the ice storm a few years back on the MA/ NH border, but that was weeks for those folks. With a well, you really need something to keep you alive depending on how often outages are.
