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Yeah i just can't wrap my head around charging a handling fee to replace a water heater under warranty when you sold the original equipment, it's just not customer friendly at all. seems so clear that 90 was leaking, just fix it and keep the customer happy, clearly an install error.

Thats wild I would immediately lose a customer if I charged them to process a warranty on equipment we are a dealer for. AO smith and their brands are also super easy to process warranty, service tech calls support, support verifies the failure, gives contractor an R number, take a photo of the full rating plate, contractor comes in and gives us the R number, we verify it, they leave with a new unit at no charge. The warranty typically processes before the new unit is pulled from the warehouse. We will occasionally call support for the R number ourselves to help the contractor out and I'm always surprised how quick the calls are for a tech support line.

there could be more than one issue but you can look right at it and see it's leaking at that elbow. wild that nobody stocks the regular AO smith 75 gallon tank around and you have to pay shipping in addition to labor? AO smith brands also do a program through distributors that will cover a portion of a contractors labor fees, not going to post a number here as its prob market based and might have changed but at the time it covered maybe half of our more expensive contractors hourly rate. But yeah they don't cover 100% of labor rates, you can try contacting AO smith directly to see if they have a better solution, I know when I had a contractor complain about the labor rates they offered to have one of their partners come do the job and we all agreed we didn't want to have someone do the replacement that worked so cheaply. This may have changed in the past couple of years, it's usually just not a huge deal, water heater changeouts can be pretty quick

did you buy the original water heater directly or did you buy it through the installer? I've seen smart contractors charge handling fees when they didn't sell the equipment, because they don't want to be out money if something happens in transport, usually its around the cost of a new unit. I've never heard of an installer charging a handling fee for a warranty unit replacement of a unit they directly sold a customer though. 1 year workmanship warranty is pretty standard, I would be shocked if this wasn't leaking in the first year lol, but yeah kind of less recourse when its been so long, and clearly that leak has been unaddressed for years.

Hi, Is the tank itself actually leaking? If not, I'd replace the cold-side plumbing down to the tank, replace the anode rod and keep going. I'd also use a different plumber. The old gate valve should have been replaced, along with having unions at the hot and cold connections. In the West, we almost always use flex connectors, which would have prevented any strain on the copper sweat joints and given unions. 🤠

Yours, Larry