Colton’s Hard Water Is Wearing Out Your Water Heater
Every gallon of water that enters a Colton home carries dissolved calcium and magnesium with it, and inside a water heater, those minerals do not stay dissolved. Heat drives them out of the water, and they settle on the tank floor as sediment, coat the heating surfaces as scale, and feed on the anode rod that protects the tank. The result is a heater that rumbles, works harder, and rusts out years earlier than the same model would in a soft-water city. Hard water rarely kills a water heater in one event; it shortens the heater's life a little every single day. This is not a guess about Colton's water. The City of Colton publishes a Consumer Confidence Report on its own water supply, and its numbers explain a pattern local homeowners know well: heaters that get loud in middle age and tanks that start leaking around the base sooner than expected. Roughly 80 percent of Colton homes were built before 1990, so most heaters here work on older plumbing, with this water running throu...