Water heater has kidney stones

[David Prast]

You do NOT need to replace the rod unless it has been eaten away. They are sacrificial....meaning when they are chewed up, replace them. If not, re-use them.

[bigangelman]

What the original poster found was maybe the remains of one or several previous anode rods.

[David Prast]

Possibly....but in my youth I worked on a residential water heater that had 6" of white gravel on the bottom of the tank. This was before the days of anode rods so it was strictly mineral deposits. I've seen it with both gas and electric water heaters. It is common. When you here rumbling noises from your water heater, it is due to an accumulation of the white granular mineral deposits. they act like a blanket of insulation on the bottom of the tank and with a gas fired water heater, it causes superheating at the bottom of the tank. This leads to porcelain lining failure which leads to rust followed by pin holes.

[Glenn Baglo]

Originally Posted by David Prast

You do NOT need to replace the rod unless it has been eaten away. They are sacrificial....meaning when they are chewed up, replace them. If not, re-use them.

Specifically, like this:

[celcius232]

You can use a small portable softener unit to treat your water that you fill your tanks with or inline at your campground connection. The ion exchange units are the same type as home units, but without the automatic brine regeneration tank. You can run several hundred gallons of water through these units before you need to regenerate them. These will remove the hardness (calcium + magnesium) in exchange for increased sodium in the water. In most water it should remove over 90% of the scale forming cations and should get most of the iron and manganese too. I use an On-The-Go unit with a Culligan cartridge sediment pre-filter.