Removing an old water heater
Water Heater Installation
Removing the old water heater part 2
It is important to get as much of the water out of the old water heater as you possibly can. Water is heavy; approximately ten pounds per gallon, so the more you can get out, the easier it will be to move the old water heater. In addition, the water at the bottom of the tank is probably full of scale and/or rust. If it spills while you are moving the tank it will stain carpets and make a mess in the house. Not the sort of thing to make the homeowner happy.
We tilted the tank to drain as much as we could. In the end, we spent almost three hours draining the water! If I had bid the job based on my estimated two hour completion time, I would have been loosing money in a hurry.
With the tank drained another little problem became evident. It is a little hard to see in the picture below, but there is not enough room for the upright water heater to slide between the door and the base of the furnace.
In other words, we were going to have to lift the old water heater over the narrow part. Including the residual water we couldn't drain and the accumulated rust and scale, I would guess the tank weighed 130-140 pounds, with about two thirds of that on the bottom. That is more than I can lift myself and near the limit of what my son and I can do together. The old hot water heater was slippery and there aren't any good handholds. To lift it you are almost forced to bend over and hold your arms around it while you lift. The body mechanics are terrible. If it gets away from you there is enough weight to break body parts (feet?) if it lands on them. It could also do serious damage to the furnace.
Even when I was a lot younger I was never strong enough to rely on brute force solutions to problems. I learned there is usually a way to move heavy objects that requires much less strength. In the picture below we set a 24" tall lab stool next to the furnace, padded the top, and tipped the water heater onto it. When we lifted the bottom and slid it onto the stool we never had to lift more than about fifty pounds. In this picture the water heater is balanced on the stool and held above the furnace.
In order to slide the water heater out of the room we needed another support, but we only had the one stool. In the garage we found two milk crates, stacked them , and put a couple of wood supports across the top.
With this in place we could slide the water heater out of the room until it was balanced on the milk crate stack. If I had been by myself I would have moved the stool to the front and slid the water heater farther out of the room. I would have repeated that until the bottom of the water heater was outside the room and I could lower it gradually and set the water heater upright again. At no time would I have had to lift the entire weight of the water heater.
In our case, we decided that with the water heater elevated and one of us on each end, the two of us could lift the water heater and carry it out. We didn't go very far carrying it though. As quickly as possible we set it down on a rug and slid it the rest of the way out of the house.
If we had to move the old water heater across carpet we could not have done this. In this case the rope worked well. For carpet we would have needed something slippery, like a piece of cardboard from the shipping carton, for it to slide on.
Keep mind the old water heater was busy dripping rusty, scale, water while we moved it. This means it is really easy to slip if you change your grip and hit a wet spot. If we had been on carpet we would have had to spread towels or something to make sure we didn't stain it. If one end had slipped and we had dropped it onto the tile hard it would have been easy to break a tile. For a professional installer these are all things that will happen at some time, so the bid for the work must have enough margin to allow for such unfortunate events.
What do I learn from all this?
Water heater removal for Manufactured home owners