A puddle on the garage floor is one of those things you notice on the way to the car and then worry about for the rest of the day. Sometimes it is nothing at all. Sometimes the tank is finished. The difference is usually visible within ten minutes of looking properly, and knowing which one you have changes whether you are ordering a part or shopping for a replacement.
Find the actual source before anything else
Water travels. It runs along the underside of the tank, follows the slope of a slab, and collects wherever the floor dips, which is rarely where it started. Dry everything with a towel, lay down a sheet of cardboard or plain paper, and come back in an hour. A dry sheet with one wet edge tells you more than a puddle ever will.
Work from the top down rather than the bottom up. The cold inlet and hot outlet connections are the most commonly missed culprits, because a slow weep at a threaded nipple runs straight down the side of the tank and pools at the base looking exactly like tank failure. Check the temperature and pressure relief valve next, along with the discharge pipe running from it. Then the drain valve at the bottom, which often seeps after it has been opened for a flush and never fully reseated.
A fitting leak and a tank leak are not the same problem
Everything above the tank wall — valves, nipples, unions, the relief line — is a repair. The parts are inexpensive and a competent plumber handles most of it in one visit.
Water coming through the tank wall itself is not a repair. The tank is glass-lined steel, and once that lining fails the steel corrodes from the inside out. Nothing patches it. If water is emerging from the seam near the bottom of the jacket, or seeping out of the insulation rather than from an identifiable fitting, the unit is at the end of its life. Age tends to settle the argument: on a tank well past a decade with a corroding base, the useful question becomes whether the tank is worth saving at all.
Damp winters make false alarms common here
A cold-weather detail catches out plenty of Snohomish County homeowners: condensation. A tank sitting in an unheated garage or crawlspace, filled with cold inlet water on a damp January morning, will sweat. Moisture beads on the jacket, runs down, and leaves a ring on the concrete that looks like a leak and is not one. Gas units firing on a cold start throw condensate in the flue as well, and some of it ends up on the floor.
The test is straightforward. A condensation ring comes and goes with the weather and never grows through a dry stretch. A real leak does not care what the forecast says. It also helps to know that slabs in older Everett garages are frequently damp anyway, which is how a genuinely slow leak sits unnoticed for months — and why that hour with a sheet of paper earns its keep. If the base stays dry but the hot water is still behaving strangely, you are probably looking at other symptoms that point somewhere else entirely.
When the water is not the heater's fault
Some tanks sit in a drain pan plumbed to a floor drain or an exterior line. If the pan is holding water while the tank above it is dry, that pan drain is blocked rather than leaking — sediment, roots in the outside run, or a trap that has dried out. The same goes for a floor drain that backs up the moment the heater is flushed: the heater is doing its job and the drain is not. That is a drain problem rather than a water heater problem, and Everett Drain Cleaning, Snohomish County handles that side of it.
Shutting it down safely
If water is actively running, kill the supply first — the cold inlet valve on top of the tank, or the main if that valve has seized. Then cut the energy: the breaker for an electric unit, the gas control to off for a gas one. Never drain a tank that is still hot and still powered. On an electric heater the elements burn out dry in seconds.
Leave the draining to whoever does the work, unless the leak is bad enough to threaten drywall or flooring. A garden hose on the drain valve run downhill and outside does work, but a tank full of sediment will clog that valve halfway through and leave you worse off than when you started.
What actually buys the next one more years
Everett draws its water from Spada Lake on the Sultan River, and it arrives comparatively soft, so scale accumulates more slowly here than it does in hard-water regions. That is a real advantage, and it makes the sediment that does settle easier to stay ahead of. For most households an annual flush covers it.
The part that gets forgotten is the anode rod. It is a sacrificial length of metal whose whole purpose is to corrode so the tank does not, and once it is consumed the tank takes over that job. Having it checked every few years costs a small fraction of a replacement and is the highest-value line on any maintenance list.
Past that, keep the area around the unit clear enough to actually see the base, make sure the pan drain runs free, and glance at the floor now and then. Most tank failures show up as a small damp patch weeks before they show up as a flood.