Water heater repair in Scranton, PA

Where Scranton's tap water comes from

Pennsylvania American Water owns the system that serves the city and most of the surrounding Lackawanna Valley boroughs. Its main supply is Lake Scranton, the reservoir off Route 307 on the city's southeastern edge, where the company runs its largest treatment plant. Upstream impoundments including Williams Bridge, Elmhurst, Hollister and Curtis feed the system from forested watersheds on the Moosic Mountain side, and a smaller filtration plant on Leggett's Creek, known as the Chinchilla plant, serves as an alternate source for the northern end of the valley.

Because nearly all of it is runoff from wooded uplands rather than limestone groundwater, Scranton's water is low in hardness minerals. A tank here rarely fills with the chalky crust common in the Lehigh Valley or central Pennsylvania. The issue residents notice more is discoloration: in spring and fall, Lake Scranton turns over as its layers mix, and manganese can rise for a few weeks. The utility has upgraded chemical feed at the plant to deal with it, but some of that dark sediment still settles in the bottom of storage tanks and shows up as brown or black water when a heater is drained.

Doubles, rowhouses and hillside cellars

Scranton grew fast during the anthracite boom, and much of the housing still dates from 1880 to 1930. In the West Side's Hyde Park, in South Side and Minooka, and in North Scranton's Providence section, the typical house is a frame double or a narrow single on a sloped lot, with a stone or block foundation and a cellar that is dry in some years and damp in others. The water heater usually sits near the foot of the cellar stairs beside the boiler or furnace, often on a small concrete pad poured decades after the house was built.

The Hill Section and Green Ridge hold larger brick and frame homes on bigger lots, some with hot water heating and an old cast-iron boiler that once made domestic hot water through a tankless coil. Many of those coils have been replaced with a standalone gas tank or an indirect tank, but plumbers still find a few working. Newer ranches in East Mountain, Tripp Park and the Pine Brook edges are more likely to have a full basement with room to work.

The slope matters more than people expect. Many Scranton houses are reached by long sets of exterior steps from the street, and a 50-gallon tank has to be carried up or down them. Tight cellar stairs, low beams and old coal bins that were never removed can turn a two-hour swap into half a day.

Lackawanna winters and flood years

Northeastern Pennsylvania winters are long, and the valley regularly sees single-digit nights in January. Water coming out of the reservoirs then is close to 40°F, so a heater has to raise it by eighty degrees or more for a shower. A 40-gallon tank that was fine for a couple in October can run cold by February with a family of four. Cellars on the uphill side of a sloped lot are often colder still, and drafts through old foundation openings can blow out a standing pilot on a windy night.

Flooding is the other local risk. Tropical Storm Lee in September 2011 and the June 2006 storms sent the Lackawanna River and its tributaries into low-lying sections of the city and neighboring boroughs, and cellars in the Plot, parts of South Side and riverside streets took water. Heavy summer downpours still overwhelm storm sewers in spots. A heater whose burner or gas control has been under water should be replaced rather than dried out and relit.

The problems plumbers see most in Scranton

• Black or brown water at the drain valve after spring and fall manganese swings from Lake Scranton.
• Pilot outages in drafty stone cellars on windy January nights in Hyde Park and Minooka.
• Orphaned heaters in oversized chimneys after a boiler upgrade vented through the wall.
• Not enough hot water in deep winter when 40°F supply meets an undersized tank.
• Leaks onto damp cellar floors that go unnoticed until the pan or the floor drain overflows.
• Burners and controls ruined by flood water in low streets near the Lackawanna.

Typical water heater prices in Scranton

Labor in Lackawanna County tends to cost a little less than in the Philadelphia suburbs or the Lehigh Valley. What raises a Scranton bill is access: exterior stairs on hillside lots, cellars with low clearance, and chimney liner work in houses where the boiler was replaced first. A Sunday night call in a cold snap carries an after-hours premium almost everywhere in the valley.

City licensing and Scranton permits

Pennsylvania has no statewide plumbing license, so the rules are set locally. Scranton tests and licenses its own master and journeyman plumbers through the city's code enforcement side, and a plumbing permit has to be submitted by a contractor holding a City of Scranton license along with proof of insurance. Applications go through the Department of Licensing, Inspections and Permits at City Hall on North Washington Avenue, which also handles building and mechanical permits.

A replacement gas water heater should get a permit and a final inspection that looks at the gas connection, vent, relief valve and discharge pipe. Before work starts, confirm that your plumber is licensed by the city rather than only by a neighboring borough, and ask who is pulling the permit. Dunmore, Dickson City, Clarks Summit and the other surrounding municipalities each enforce the state construction code on their own terms.

Venting after a boiler or furnace upgrade

Thousands of Scranton homes have swapped an old oil or gas boiler for a high-efficiency model that vents out a sidewall with plastic pipe. That leaves the water heater as the only appliance using a masonry chimney sized for something several times larger. A tall, cold flue in a stone-foundation double does not warm up quickly enough to draw the small exhaust plume of a 40,000 BTU tank, and condensation forms inside, eating at the mortar and sometimes dripping back onto the heater.

Plumbers usually solve this one of three ways: an aluminum or stainless liner sized to the heater, a power-vent tank that pushes exhaust out through the wall, or a move to a sealed-combustion or tankless unit. Clay tile chimneys from the early 1900s are often cracked, so an inspection with a camera before choosing makes sense. If you notice a damp smell, rust streaks on the vent connector or a carbon monoxide alarm sounding near the cellar stairs, shut the heater down until someone has looked.

Sizing for a valley winter

Sizing in Scranton should be based on February, not September. With the supply barely above 40°F, a standard 40-gallon gas tank delivers noticeably less usable hot water in the depth of winter, and a family taking back-to-back showers will find the bottom of it. Many households here are better served by a 50-gallon gas tank with a larger burner, or by keeping the existing size and adding a thermostatic mixing valve so the tank can be stored hotter safely.

Tankless heaters work in the valley, but their flow drops when the incoming water is that cold. A unit that delivers a comfortable five gallons a minute in summer may manage closer to three and a half in winter. That matters in older doubles where one bathroom sits above the other and both are used in the morning. UGI, which supplies natural gas to most of the city, may also need to confirm meter capacity before a larger tankless unit goes in.

Repair or replace in Scranton

Given how much carrying and fitting goes into a cellar replacement here, fixing a heater under about nine years old is usually the better deal. A pilot assembly, an element or a relief valve costs a fraction of a new tank. Once a tank is past ten or twelve years, shows weeping at the base, or has been sitting in a wet cellar, putting money into it rarely pays off. PPL Electric Utilities and UGI have each offered efficiency rebates on water heating at times, and those can make a heat pump tank or a high-efficiency gas model easier to justify. A heat pump unit does pull warmth out of the cellar air, which in a cold Scranton basement can slow its recovery noticeably.

For more on the choice, see water heater replacement and our guide on whether to repair or replace a water heater. If the problem is a dark cloud at the drain valve, a flush and sediment clean-out is usually the first step.

Around Scranton

Dunmore borders the city to the east and shares the same reservoir supply, with its own borough code office. Dickson City, Throop and Olyphant run up the valley to the north, while Clarks Summit and South Abington Township sit on the higher ground to the northwest with newer homes and bigger basements. Moosic, Old Forge and Taylor lie to the south toward Wilkes-Barre. Each borough or township handles plumbing permits separately, and a few outlying homes still rely on private wells.

Water heater questions from Scranton