tankless hot water heaters can be great for your home because you'll save money and you'll never run out of hot water now of course the other benefit is they don't have a tank but many people confuse that with the idea that they don't need to do any maintenance and that's completely wrong because a tankless hot water heater needs to be cleaned out once a year and if you don't clean it out your system will fail early you'll get less hot water than you're supposed to and ultimately will cost you money a plumber can do this cleaning for you but they can charge as much as 300. and you'll be paying that every single year so in this video i'm gonna show you that you can do the job yourself it's easy and it's a lot less expensive here's what you'll need to do this job three gallons of regular household vinegar a couple of hoses now these are just regular washing machine hoses but you'll also need to get one of these submersible pumps and a 5 gallon bucket and i've put a complete parts list in the description and even if you buy all of these things you'll still spend less on these parts than you will to hire a plumber even one time now go to your tankless hot water unit and you'll want to turn it off this can be done usually just by pressing an on off button on the front of the unit but when this is done you'll also want to turn off your gas and this will usually be a valve located very close to the hot water heater you are going to spill a little bit of water doing this job so put that 5 gallon bucket right underneath your hot water heater now let's look underneath the tankless unit because you need to have a set of valves that look like this they're going to usually have a red and blue valve but in addition you can see these yellow handle valves these control the water that goes into the hot water heater and out so now i'm turning each valve to the closed position i've now stopped the flow of water going in and out of the hot water heater now i need to remove these protective caps on the end of these flushing valves now you can slowly open up the valves on the top of each one of those manifolds you can start with the blue valve and you'll see that just a little bit of water comes out but when you go over the red valve and open that one up you'll see a lot more water pours out now this is the water that's inside of the water heater so it doesn't take very long at all for the entire thing to drain now we need to rinse off our pre-filter because these tankless heaters have a small screen designed to protect them in case anything got into the pipes now fortunately most of them have the pre-filter outside of the heater itself this one's got a small black plastic cap that you just need to unscrew that's not uncommon that these can be stuck a bit so use a small pair of channel locks to give it a little bit of a nudge this particular unit has not been cleaned in about three years and you can see there's quite a bit of build up on the screen now you might have a lot more build up in here and this can get in the way of your water flow i'm gonna take a minute to clean this off you can use a small toothbrush or just give it a shake inside a bucket of water now just rethread that filter screen right back into position now in this one i'm just going to thread it in by hand there's no need to use a wrench to tighten it up now we're ready to start the flush so grab those washing machine hoses and you're going to thread one end of each to each one of those ports on the flush valve now grab your submersible pump and we're going to connect the end of the blue hose to the top of the pump remember the pump is going to be pumping the fluid up into the hot water system red hose is the return line so that's just gonna hang into the bucket just like you see there but now you can take the submersible pump and put it directly into the bottom of the bucket now you're gonna grab that vinegar and pour all three gallons into the bucket things look good so go ahead and plug your pump in and let's get started now you can see our vinegar is beginning to do its job it's being pumped up through the blue hose and it's coming back into the bucket by the red hose but what's happening is inside the hot water system itself that vinegar is going to eat away any kind of mineral buildup calcium or other deposits inside the heat exchanger i want to keep an eye on this to make sure that nothing spills out but you need to leave it running for about 45 minutes up to about an hour and you can see what the solution looked like when i started but after running it for an hour the story got a lot different and this stuff looked pretty nasty after you've run the cleaning solution for an hour you can go ahead and unplug your pump then you're going to close the red and the blue valves on top of the manifold finally you can remove both of the washing machine hoses and you'll want to replace both of those protective caps and screw them tight as an optional step you can go ahead and remove that pre-filter a second time if you want to check it just to make sure that nothing else got logged in that filter screen now you can remove the pump from the bucket and dump that solution outside and because you're using vinegar you don't really have to worry about anything toxic stuff looks pretty nasty this thing definitely needed to be cleaned it's probably some type of calcium or lime buildup completing the job is easy just go to any faucet in the house or a bathtub turn the hot water position on but of course you're not going to have any hot water coming out because the water valves on the unit are still in the off position so now you can go ahead and turn both of those valves back to their original position this will also flush out the little bit of vinegar that was still inside the hot water tank finally you'll want to turn your gas valve back to the on position and turn the power back on your tankless hot water system it's normal to have some air in the pipes once you turn your water back on and this will be gone in just a couple of minutes now your system is clean and it's ready to work for you for another year and hope this video was helpful and could show you that you can maintain your own hot water tankless system yourself if you like this video please give me a thumbs up subscribe to my channel if you're not already for more videos coming up