Before you replace it in Stallings
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 Union County Water, 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 Stallings itself changes
The housing in Stallings
Stallings has the single highest concentration of target-age housing anywhere in the Charlotte metro: 62.6% of the stock was built between 1990 and 2009, with a median build year of 2002. Practically every original water heater in the town has already been replaced once, and that second unit is now reaching the end of its own life.
The pipe era
Copper and PEX in the bulk of the stock, with polybutylene possible in the pre-1997 portion. The pipework is rarely the problem here; the heater usually is.