Laconia is one of the few places we work where most water heaters are fed treated surface water instead of well water. The city draws from Paugus Bay and filters it at the Stark Street plant, so your tank isn’t fighting the iron and sediment that shorten their lives out in the hill towns. Something else is going on inside it instead. We size, install and repair tank, tankless and indirect units, and you get the number first.
Laconia’s water comes out of Paugus Bay — surface water, not a well field — and is coagulated, clarified and filtered at the treatment plant on Stark Street before it goes anywhere. On the way the city adds sodium hydroxide to control pH and zinc orthophosphate for corrosion control. That last one is the part that touches your water heater: it’s there to lay a protective film inside the pipe so the water doesn’t pull metal out of your house’s plumbing on its way to the tap.
It works. The city’s most recent reported lead result was a 90th-percentile value of 4 parts per billion against an action level of 15, copper at 0.034 ppm against 1.3, and not one sampled site over the limit. But read what that report says about where lead comes from in the first place — service lines and the plumbing inside the house. Treated water arriving at your curb stop is the utility’s business. The old copper and brass between there and your water heater is yours.
So the failure pattern here isn’t a tank silted up with well sediment. It’s anode rods nobody has looked at in a decade, dielectric unions that never got installed where copper meets steel, and tanks fed by a galvanized branch that’s been closing up for twenty years — which from inside the shower looks exactly like a failing water heater, and isn’t. We check that before we sell you a tank. It costs us some tank sales. Out past Parade Road and toward the Gilford line you’re on a well and the whole calculation changes.
If your tank is over about eight years old and sits above a finished room or a tenant’s apartment, put a pan and a drain line under it now. We can do it on a service call, and it is the cheapest protection in the building.
Three questions decide this and none of them is the brand on the front. How many bathrooms get used at the same time; what fuel you have and what it would really cost to change it; and whether the building is heated all winter. That third one gets skipped constantly in this city, because so much of the housing here is a rental or a seasonal place — and a tank you can’t drain down easily in an unheated building is the wrong tank no matter what the efficiency sticker says.
In a two- or three-unit the real question is one big tank in the basement or a unit per apartment. One tank is cheaper to put in and worse to live with: a single failure is three tenants with no hot water, and you’re buying the fuel for all of them. Separate units cost more up front and settle the billing argument permanently. We’ll put both in front of you with numbers on them. If there’s already an oil boiler in the basement, a properly sized indirect tank hung off it is usually the cheapest hot water in the building.
Tankless gets asked about a lot, and it isn’t always the answer. It wants adequate gas supply and a proper vent run, and in an old Laconia house getting both to where the old tank sat can cost more than the unit does. Where it makes sense — a tight mechanical room, a building with no real basement, a camp you want to drain completely every fall — it makes a great deal of sense. Either way the gas line and the venting are in the quote, not discovered afterward.
Installed, a standard electric tank starts around $2,400. A 65–80 gallon electric runs $5,000–$7,000; propane or natural gas, $6,000–$9,000. An indirect tank off a boiler you already own runs $2,200–$3,400, while replacing the oil-fired boiler itself starts at $16,000. Tankless is $9,000–$13,000 installed, with any gas upsizing and venting in that number. A repair on a unit worth saving usually runs $500–$700.
It helps that you’re not pushing well sediment and iron through it, and the city treats for corrosion control on the way to your house. But the tank still has an anode rod doing its job quietly until it’s gone, and it still has whatever old pipe is feeding it. City water moves the failure, it doesn’t remove it.
Often not. In pre-1960 Laconia housing, weak hot water is frequently galvanized supply pipe closing up from the inside rather than anything wrong with the tank. The tell is cold water that’s fine while hot is poor, or pressure that drops hard when a second fixture opens. We’d rather find that than sell you a tank that doesn’t fix it.
Depends on who pays the fuel bill and how much a failure costs you. One basement tank is the cheaper install and means one failure takes out three apartments. A unit per apartment costs more now, ends the billing argument, and contains the problem. We’ll price both for your building rather than tell you the general answer.
Sometimes. The unit is rarely the obstacle — gas supply and venting are. In an old house, running adequate gas and a correct vent to where the old tank stood can cost more than the tankless itself, which is why we quote all three together. If the numbers don’t work we’ll say so and put a tank back in.
Every few years is reasonable, and it’s cheap to look at while somebody’s already there on a service call. Ask us to note its condition on the invoice. That one line tells you more about how much life the tank has left than the brand name or the warranty card does.
Tell us what’s happening and we’ll give you a straight answer — what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there.
Describe what’s happening and where the property is. We’ll come back with a straight answer on what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there. If it’s an emergency, say so in the first line.
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