And back to plumbing....
Allthough I was advised to not do this...
1) I did a power flush of my 24 year old maytag water heater .
2) drained tank
3) unhooked the hot water outlet
4) ran a camera down through that hot water outlet
What I found...
1) Very little sediment at hose outlet
2) top and bottom elements Shiney clean
3) dip tube is straight down with a curve on the bottom
4) sides of tank looks good (for what I could see)
I did see some sediment by the bottom element, it looked more like a handful of steel wool.
Pictures are not great, but pretty hard to take a pic, and hold the camera still. My wife tried, but that was not successful.
I believe there is still some life left in this ol heater.
Took about an hour to reheat the 50 gallons back to 140