PlumbingBossPro Blog — Water Heaters & Maintenance Plans

Yearly Water Heater Flush Plans at 365 Days: How Plumbing Visits Come Due on Their Own

A yearly flush plan sounds simple: visit every member once a year. The hard part is the remembering. Fifty members is manageable on a whiteboard. Three hundred members signed up in different months, with some visits running late and some moved up, is not. The plan has to keep track of itself.

From the Record to the Plan

A flush plan is built on the house record, so it helps to have the details from Tank or Tankless, Gas or Electric: The Water Heater Details Every Plumber Should Record in place first. Once the house knows it has a 50-gallon gas tank in the garage, the plan knows what kind of visit is coming.

In PlumbingBossPro, recurring work is set by minimum days between visits. A yearly water heater flush is 365 days. That number is the whole schedule.

How “Minimum Days Between Visits” Works

Instead of picking a date on the calendar for every member, you set how long must pass between visits. When a visit is completed, the count starts again. When 365 days have passed since the last flush, the next one comes due.

This has a few practical effects:

• Late visits do not stack up. If a member's flush ran two weeks late this year, next year's visit is counted from the day it was actually done. You never end up with two flushes a month apart.
• Members spread out naturally. People sign up all year, so their visits come due all year. The work does not land in one crushing month.
• Nobody maintains a calendar. There is no master list of dates to update when a visit moves.

Where Due Visits Show Up

When a flush comes due, it appears on the Waiting List, a live map and list of every visit waiting to be scheduled. The pin turns from not due yet to due now. The office sees it alongside every other due flush, descaling, softener service and backflow test, and puts it on a van and a day.

The Waiting List has its own guide next in the series. For now, the key point is that nobody has to go looking for members who are due. They come to you.

One Plan, Many Kinds of Visits

The 365-day yearly flush is the most common water heater plan, but the same setup handles other recurring work a plumbing company does:

• Tankless descaling, yearly or on whatever schedule your water calls for.
• Water softener service, yearly or more often.
• Backflow testing, usually yearly.
• Restaurant grease-line jetting, every 14 or 30 days.

A house can have more than one. A member with a tank water heater and a softener might have both visits on the same yearly cycle, so one trip covers both.

Setting Up a New Member

When a customer signs up, whether at the end of a repair call, through the sign-up form or from the customer app, the office sets the yearly flush on their house. If you flush the tank on the same day they sign up, that visit starts the clock. If they sign up first and the flush is scheduled for next week, the first visit is a normal job, and the 365 days start when it is completed.

Make sure the water heater is on the house record before the first visit. The tech should arrive knowing whether it is a tank or tankless unit and where it sits.

When a Member Wants a Different Rhythm

Not every house needs exactly one visit a year. Hard water, a large family or a tank with a sediment problem might justify a shorter cycle. A rental that turns over tenants might want a visit tied to move-outs as well. Because the plan is just a number of days, you can set it per house. A member on a 180-day plan is set up the same way as one on 365.

Keep the default simple, though. One yearly plan with one price is easier to sell and easier to run than a menu of options. Pricing is covered in How to Price a Water Heater Flush Plan for a Plumbing Company.

The Plan Is the Promise

When a customer pays for a yearly flush, they are trusting you to show up next year without being asked. Setting the plan at 365 days and letting the visit come due on its own is how a small shop keeps that promise for hundreds of houses. To see how flush plans connect to the Waiting List, the inspection checklist and billing, visit the PlumbingBossPro water heater service software page.