Rheem Series Gladiator Water Heater 02/07/23

While cooking dinner I went into the pantry to get something and noticed a beeping sound. I went looking for the sound and ended up in my garage next to my 6-month old water heater. This is the same water heater from the great slab leak of 22. This is a feature rich model which includes a smartphone app called Econet and a leak detector module. So why was it beeping at me. I couldn’t really tell from the console of the water heater as you can see below. I think the ‘Service Needed’ light might have been illuminated. It was beeping so I hit Clear Alert and I could hear the auto shut off turning back on.

I remembered that I had an app for that so I opened the app and checked out the health of the water heater. Everything reported ok. A short time later the beeping returned. This time I was able to review the situation using my app. The system detected moisture and thus sounded the alarm. To be fair, it was raining and very humid last night. I inspected the pan and all the places where you’d expect to find a leak. There was no leak.

I ended up reading about the sensor while dinner cooked and concluded that the sensor is very sensitive and that false positives are common with this setup. Clearing the alert is supposed to delay the auto shut off for 24 hours. Everything looks fine as of 11:46 am. If the sensor trips again tonight then my next step is to reset the sensor which of course involves taking the panels off the unit. Why would a designer make that easy? Let’s see what happens.

Update – as of 02/12/2023 no further alerts or alarms.