Need Hot Water Heater Advice
Last weekend I went to turn on my hot water heater and had some issues. After a few minutes I saw and smelled a smoke and a burning smell coming out of the outside vent on my rig. Since this smoke w...
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Kit Carson wrote:CloudDriver wrote:How did you rig up that drain line? Looks like something that is very convenient.
Before you spend a bunch of $$ on this issue, it would be wise to determine whether there is actually a problem with the water heater.
The picture below shows the burner section of our Atwood 6 gallon water heater. Spiders are known to be drawn to the odor of propane and may have built a web inside your burner tube. A few years back I had a spider do that right at the elbow of the tube and when I turned the heater on flames came shooting up out of the air slots. This could be the source of your fire and smoke. If so, cleaning of the burner tube will eliminate the problem.
Another possible source of smoke is that wasps or other insects may have built a nest in the larger tube that carries the flame into the heater.
As far as the source of the water you are seeing, propane is a hydrocarbon fuel that produces water and carbon dioxide when burned. With cold water in the heater, the water from combustion will condense on the walls of the tube inside the heater for a while until the tube warms up. This condensate will run out of the low end of the tube, which looks like a leak, but isn't.
It's pretty much what it looks like. Each end of the 1/2 inch hose has a barb to male thread nylon adapter, plus the 1/2 inch ball valve on the end. I used reinforced tubing due to the water pressure and hot water. All parts came from either Lowes or Home Depot.
At the end of the season, I remove the drain hose from the tank so I can flush the hard water crud out of the tank, then screw the original nylon plug in finger tight to keep the bugs out.
