Before you call anyone, go look at the thing. If it is a gas tank and you have no hot water at all, kneel down, find the little window near the burner, and see whether the pilot is lit. If it is out, that is the whole diagnosis in most cases, and the part behind it costs about twenty dollars.
If it is electric, open the access panel and press the red reset button on the upper thermostat. Sometimes that is it too.
We would rather you tried both of those than paid a trip charge to watch someone else do it. What follows is for the heaters where that does not work, and for the one situation where repair is not on the table at all.
If it is leaking from the tank, there is no repair
This is the one thing worth being blunt about. A water heater is a steel tank with a thin glass lining, and once that lining fails the steel rusts through from the inside. There is no patch. There is no weld. Anybody who quotes you a repair on a tank that is weeping from its body is either mistaken or taking your money.
The distinction that matters is where the water is coming from. Drips from a fitting on top, from the temperature and pressure valve, from the drain valve at the bottom, or from a union, all of those are fixable and often cheap. Water seeping out of the seam of the tank itself, or pooling under the center of it with no fitting overhead, means the tank is done. Replace it before it opens up, because when they go they go all at once, and in a Los Altos or El Dorado Park slab house the heater is often in a garage or an interior closet with nothing but drywall between it and forty gallons of water.
What actually breaks here, and what it costs
On the gas side, the usual suspect is the thermocouple, the thin copper probe sitting in the pilot flame. Its job is to prove to the gas valve that there is a flame to burn into. When it fails, the pilot will not stay lit, and the fix runs somewhere around $150 to $250 with labor. Next most common is the gas control valve, which is a bigger part and lands in the $300 to $450 range. Past that you are into territory where the arithmetic starts arguing for a new heater instead.
Electric heaters break differently. A single failed element gives you lukewarm water that runs out fast, and elements and thermostats are inexpensive parts, usually $200 to $350 installed.
Then there is the noise. If your heater rumbles, pops, or makes a sound like gravel in a can, nothing is broken. That is sediment on the bottom of the tank, steam bubbles forcing their way up through it, and it is the local water talking. Long Beach runs a blend of Central Basin groundwater and imported supply that lands somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 grains per gallon, which is properly hard. Check the city’s own water quality report rather than taking that from us. Hard water means minerals drop out of suspension every time the burner fires, and after eight years there is a layer of scale on the tank floor that the burner has to heat through. A flush helps if you have been doing it. If you have never flushed it in a decade, flushing it now sometimes unsettles debris into the drain valve and leaves you with a valve that will not close, so understand that before you start.
The gas utility is the city, not SoCalGas
Long Beach is one of the very few cities in California that runs its own gas utility, serving Long Beach and Signal Hill. This matters twice.
First, if you smell gas near the heater, this is not a plumbing call. Leave the house and call the city gas utility from outside. They come out for that, and they do not charge you to come.
Second, when a repair turns into a replacement, the rebate and incentive programs available to you are the city’s, not the ones you will find on a statewide utility’s website. Ask about them before you buy, not after.
Two things a repair visit should catch
Seismic strapping. California Health and Safety Code section 19211 requires water heaters to be strapped, and in a town sitting on the Newport-Inglewood fault, the one that produced the 1933 earthquake, this is not paperwork. A heater that walks off its connections in a quake is a gas line and a water line both torn open in a closed garage. Two straps, upper third and lower third. If yours has one strap or none, get it fixed while somebody is already standing there.
The other is the flue. In Naples, Belmont Shore, and Alamitos Beach the salt air eats galvanized vent pipe from the outside in, and a corroded flue on an atmospheric-vent gas heater is a carbon monoxide problem, not a plumbing one. It is worth two minutes of anybody’s inspection.
When to stop repairing
A rough rule that has served people well: if the heater is past ten years and the repair is more than about half the cost of replacing it, replace it. You are not buying a fixed heater at that point, you are renting one, and the tank underneath is still the same age it was this morning.
Under eight years, repair almost anything that is not the tank. Between eight and twelve, it depends entirely on which part failed and whether the anode rod has anything left. Over twelve, we would want a good reason to spend money on it.
Questions
There is water in the drip pan. Is the tank gone?
Not necessarily, and this is worth checking before you panic. Look at the discharge pipe from the temperature and pressure relief valve, which is the one that runs down the side. If the water is coming out of there, the tank is fine and the T&P valve is doing exactly what it was built to do, which means either it has failed open or your water pressure or temperature is too high. Both are fixable. Only if the pan is filling from above the base of the tank with no pipe overhead do you have a dead heater.
My pilot keeps going out every few weeks.
Failing thermocouple, most likely. It is a cheap part.
Do I need a permit to repair one?
No. A repair is a repair. A replacement is a different story: swapping the unit is permitted work through Long Beach Development Services, and the permit is what forces the seismic straps, the expansion tank, the correct venting, and the drip pan to actually get installed. Plenty of heaters in this city were swapped by somebody’s cousin with no permit and none of the above, and you find out when you sell. Anyone who tells you a replacement does not need one should not be doing the work. Ask to see the C-36 license and the CSLB number while you are at it.
How long should a heater last in Long Beach?
Ten to twelve years is realistic on this water. Flush it yearly and check the anode rod at five years and you will get more. Nobody does either, which is why twelve is the number.
Get it looked at
Tell us the age of the heater, whether it is gas or electric, and exactly where the water is if there is water. That is enough to know whether this is a $180 part or a conversation about a new water heater. If it is the cheap answer, that is the answer you get.
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