Keep Above
Repair or replace the water heater
A water heater that's leaking, tripping or running cold puts the usual two options on the table: fix this one or fit another. Enter what the repair would cost and the extra years you'd expect from it, then a replacement with the years it would last — each side lands on a cost per year over its own life, the one figure they share. No winner is declared; the estimates are yours.
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Comes off the replacement
Put in what the fix would cost and what a replacement would cost. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Repairing | Replacing | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | — | — |
| Running costs over its life | — | — |
| Total over its life | — | — |
| How long that covers | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a month | — | — |
What does replacing a water heater involve beyond buying the unit?
A water heater is plumbed in and fixed where it stands, so a replacement is not carried in and pushed into a gap. The old one has to be drained and disconnected, the new one positioned and connected, and on some installations the fittings, the valves or the flue route have to be picked up as well. The replacement box asks what a replacement would cost, and on a heater that means the fitted cost — enter the unit alone and the replacement side reads lower than the job would really come to.
It also runs every day of the year, and part of what it uses goes on holding a tank at temperature rather than on heating what comes out of the tap. That second part carries on through days when nobody draws much hot water at all. So a difference between the old heater and a replacement repeats on every bill rather than following a busy week, which is why the running-costs boxes carry more of the result here than on an appliance that spends most of its time switched off.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
A replacement arrives as one bill on one day, which is the kind of expense a sinking fund exists for — how budgeting apps handle money set aside for later bills.
About this calculator
What counts as the repair cost for a water heater?
The whole of the quote to have hot water again — call-out, the element, thermostat or valve that failed, and the labour to fit it. The cost per year spreads that full amount over the extra years you think the repair would buy, so a partial figure would flatter the repair side.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Where the old unit and a replacement would use noticeably different amounts of power or gas across a year, that difference belongs in the running-costs boxes. Where the two would run much the same, both boxes can stay at $0 and the comparison rests on the up-front figures.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the water heater for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. Where the old heater already takes more each year to run than the replacement does all-up, no length of time would bring them level, and the line says so rather than printing a number.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old heater would fetch comes off the replacement's cost. A drained tank is metal by the time it comes out, so on many jobs there is nothing to put here, and taking it away is more likely to appear as part of the fitting cost than as money coming back.