Water Heater Repair & Replacement

We all take hot water for granted until we lose it. The last thing we want is for our customers to be without hot water. Laundry, dishes, showers -- we want to help you get back to normal as quickly as possible.

Oftentimes, homeowners come home to a flooded garage from a water heater that has ruptured. The first thing you need to do is turn off the power supply to the heater (the breaker for electric, the gas valve for gas) and shut off the cold water supply valve at the top of the tank. Then call Shaw Plumbing -- we'll get to you quickly and give you a straight answer on whether a repair or a replacement is the right call.

Florida's hard water puts extra stress on water heaters, often shortening their lifespan compared to other parts of the country. Our experienced, licensed plumbers can help you choose the right system for your home -- a traditional tank or a modern tankless unit -- and install it to code so it lasts.

Repair usually makes sense when the unit is under about eight years old and the problem is a single failed part -- a heating element, a thermostat, or the temperature-and-pressure relief valve. Replacement is the smarter move when the tank itself is leaking, the unit is past ten years old, or you are calling for repairs more than once a season.

Where the water is coming from tells you a lot. A drip from the temperature-and-pressure valve, a loose fitting, or the drain valve is usually a repairable problem. Water seeping from the bottom seam of the tank is not -- that means the steel inner tank has corroded through from the inside, and no repair fixes it. It only gets worse, and a corroded tank can eventually flood the space around it.

Recovery time is another tell. If your hot water runs out faster than it used to, or the tank takes noticeably longer to reheat between showers, sediment has usually built up across the bottom of the tank. On an older unit that is often a sign it is heading toward the end of its life. We will weigh the age, condition, and repair cost against a new unit and give you an honest recommendation -- not a heater you don't need.

Both work well on the Space Coast. The right choice comes down to how much hot water your household uses and how much maintenance you want to keep up with. A tank is simpler and less expensive to install; a tankless is compact, longer-lived, and heats water on demand -- but Florida's hard water makes its yearly maintenance a real commitment.

A conventional tank water heater stores heated water and keeps a full 40-, 50-, or 75-gallon cylinder hot and ready. It is the system most Melbourne homes already have and costs less to put in. The trade-offs are a larger footprint, standby energy loss from keeping the tank hot, and a shorter typical lifespan of roughly 8 to 12 years in our area.

A tankless water heater heats water only as it flows through the unit, so you get continuous hot water within the unit's flow limit and never pay to keep a tank warm. It mounts on a wall, frees up floor space, and commonly lasts 15 to 20 years. The honest catch for our region: hard-water scale collects on the heat exchanger, so a tankless unit needs to be descaled every year. Skip that in Brevard County's hard water and it can scale up, lose efficiency, and wear out faster than the brochure suggests. If you keep up the maintenance a tankless rewards you; if not, a tank is more forgiving.

A straightforward tank swap usually takes a few hours. We shut off the water and the fuel supply, drain the old tank, and disconnect it. Then we set and level the new unit, reconnect the water, gas or electric, and venting, add a new temperature-and-pressure valve and drain pan where code calls for it, refill, purge the air, and test before we leave.

Switching from a tank to a tankless takes longer, since it often involves resizing the gas line, adding venting, and sometimes electrical work plus wall mounting. Either way, we haul the old unit away, pull the required permit, and leave the connections clean and to code.

Yes. Water heater replacements in Melbourne and across Brevard County require a permit and an inspection, and the work has to meet the current Florida Building Code. Shaw Plumbing is a licensed Florida plumbing contractor (license CFC1429898), and we pull the permit and handle the inspection as part of the job.

Permitting is not just paperwork. A code-compliant install means the right temperature-and-pressure relief valve and discharge line, a thermal expansion tank where the home has a backflow preventer, a proper drain pan, and correct venting on gas units so combustion gases exit safely. A permitted, inspected install also protects you at resale and with your insurance. An unpermitted install that skips these details can leave you with a safety hazard and a problem when you sell -- which is why we do it the right way.

Brevard County's hard water leaves mineral scale and sediment inside the tank. That layer insulates the burner or element from the water, forces the unit to run longer and hotter, and shortens its life.

Two pieces of maintenance matter most. First, the anode rod -- a sacrificial metal rod inside the tank that corrodes so the steel tank doesn't. In hard water it depletes faster, so having it checked every few years and replaced when it is spent can add real life to a tank. Second, flushing the tank once a year clears out the sediment that settles on the bottom; that sediment is what causes the popping and rumbling you hear, which is water boiling underneath the buildup. For tankless units, the equivalent is an annual descaling of the heat exchanger. Stay on top of these and your water heater will outlast a neglected one by years.

For a tank, size by household demand: a 40-gallon tank generally suits 1 to 2 people, 50 gallons fits most 3-to-4-person homes, and 75 gallons serves 5 or more or a home with a big soaking tub. For tankless, you size by flow rate in gallons per minute so the unit can supply every fixture you would realistically run at the same time.

An undersized tank leaves the last person in the morning with a cold shower, while an oversized one wastes energy keeping water hot that nobody uses. With tankless, the math is about simultaneous demand: a shower runs roughly 2 gallons per minute, so a home that might run two showers and a sink at once needs a unit rated well above that. Florida's warm incoming groundwater works in your favor, since a tankless unit has less temperature rise to produce than it would up north. When we quote a replacement, we look at your real usage and recommend a size that fits.