Plumbing

Testing Water Heater Elements

Name: Testing Water Heater Elements
Uploaded: 2025-10-01T15:54:53Z
Duration: 3 min 19 s
Description: With power off and verified, use a multimeter set to ohms to test each heating element. Disconnect one wire, place the leads on the element screws, and check resistance—around 12.6–12.8Ω for a 4500W element. A proper reading means the element is good. Reattach wires snugly, replace insulation and covers, and confirm the system is safe and sealed.

With power off and verified, use a multimeter set to ohms to test each heating element. Disconnect one wire, place the leads on the element screws, and check resistance—around 12.6–12.8Ω for a 4500W element. A proper reading means the element is good. Reattach wires snugly, replace insulation and covers, and confirm the system is safe and sealed.

Electric Water Heater

Diagnostic

Hard Skills

Mark Cukro

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Transcript

Okay, so now we have the plastic guard off, and you can see this is where 240 volts comes in and then it gets transferred. To the elements. Okay, so I turn the breaker off. Make sure you check. Do not trust a circuit breaker. The breaker should be off. Sometimes you'll get voltage, which means you did not turn off the right breaker.

So there's no voltage here. I just wanna make sure. Double check. Excellent. So now we have the element here itself. Okay? So if you look, there's one terminal screw. One terminal screw here. What you want to do now is take your multimeter. And set it on oms. So right in here you can see the display where it says voltage.

So I turn it to oms and you can see that there's an M there, which means mega, which means I'm in the wrong range. I wanna change that by hitting the range button until there's no symbol like kilo or mega. So this means open line. So what happens here now is if I touch the leads together. You will get very close to zero, which is perfect.

Point two, 0.3, 0.1. Sometimes you'll get a zero. If we look up at the element, I have to take one of these off one of these wires in order to have a good om reading from the element. So just push that to the side. Now I'm gonna take each lead and if this is a 4,500 watt element and it's a 30 or 40 gallon water heater.

I should have approximately 12.8 ohms. So one lead goes here, and remember when there's no power, you can put one hand on each lead. And if you look at the multimeter, let me hold this here for you. Okay. You can see that it's 12.6 and sometimes it'll fluctuate to 0.7, 0.8. This means the element works perfectly.

Now there's no energy, which we already checked, so we put the wire back on. Make sure it's nice and tight.

That's good and snug. Push that in. Take this one off. Okay, now we're gonna take one of these screws off. We're just loosen it and take the wire off and we'll do the same on this element and we should have, again, approximately 12.8 ohms. And we do 12.6, which means this element also works well. So let me put this back on.

Tighten it up. Okay. Push the wires back in. We'll put the covers back on.

Okay, there we go. Now these covers could probably be replaced. They're old, they've been bent. You can tell the people have had access to this for a long time, many times over the years. There we go. Okay. Now much of a challenge is getting the insulation in. There we go. Okay. The insulation is already on here, so I'll take one of the screws, put the panel back on.