Before you replace it in Mount Pleasant
Our published rule applies here exactly as it does in Charlotte, and it is the same rule whoever answers the phone:
- Under 8 years old: we repair it. Elements, thermostats, gas valves and dip tubes are serviceable parts on a tank with years left in it.
- 8 to 12 years old: we repair it if the fix lands under about $500. You are risking $250 to defer $2,000.
- Leaking from the tank body, at any age: replace it. A perforated tank cannot be patched.
What decides which of those you are in is partly the water. Yours comes from the Town, treated from Dutch Buffalo Creek, and that is the supply whose chemistry has been working on the inside of your tank for its whole life. Where the water is soft and lightly buffered it corrodes rather than scales, which means tanks end by anode depletion and perforation rather than a slow decline. A leak from the shell is a genuine end-of-life signal here rather than something to nurse along.

What Mount Pleasant itself changes
The housing in Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant is a small town with a genuinely old core, listed as a historic district, wrapped in newer building on the edges. The older properties are the ones that surprise people: heaters tucked into spaces that were never designed for them, discharge pipes that were run to suit the room rather than the code, and shutoff valves that have not been turned in twenty years. We plan for that rather than discovering it.
The pipe era
The older core is where galvanised supply may still be in service. That shows up as weak flow on hot and cold together, which is a different fault from the hot-only restriction a heat trap nipple causes, and it is worth separating before anyone quotes you for a heater.