In Darnestown since 1995. On well water. Gas heat. Water is low pH (acidic), around 6.6 untreated. Therefore, w have appropriate neutralizer, softener, and filtering.
We also bought one, two, then three of the most-expensive, supposedly longest-lasting BRADFORD-WHITE water heaters. We needed #4 earlier this year after another B-W tank failure due to bottom rust-out.
The location, system has always been kept pristine: Clean, dry, cool, painted, no obvious stupidities. We had kept the tank flushed properly. We thought we had maintained the sacrificial anode properly — we inspected the rod after this third failure and it looked fine. We’re still not sure what was wrong to bottom rust-out 3 BRADFORD-WHITE water heaters.
This time — for water heater #4 (now averaging a new one every 7.5 years) — we put in a RHEEM brand (all specs the same; added a local miniature pressure tank to ‘meet current plumbing code’) and instead of a SACRIFICIAL ANODE we installed an ACTIVE TITANIUM ANODE.
A friend had done the same years ago in another house, another location, and confirmed that his RHEEM had already lasted 17 years (using an ACTIVE TITANIUM ANODE) and showed no issues to-date.
I will maintain here what we discover.
My last visit to the ‘water tank temporary graveyard’ out back of WRF SONS PLUMBING in Mt. Airy revealed essentially an even mix of all the various brands, indicating to me that the brands all suffer and fail roughly the same. That suggests that the pH and anode effectiveness is most important by far.