The Vulcan Freeloader is a very common cylinder found around New Zealand for gas water heating. Available in Natural Gas and LPG, they were a popular choice in the 80s and 90s. However, these heaters are known to fail and have been the subject of many replacement jobs we have done.

These cylinders were originally made in Australia by the company Vulcan. In 2002 , Rheem aquired the Vulcan Company, and the Freeloader was no longer produced.

99% of these Vulcan Freeloader water heaters fail because of the thermocouple, which causes the pilot light to go out, meaning no hot water. Every one of these cylinders we have replaced had this issue. And the problem is that the parts are no longer manufactured, which makes repairing them impossible.

Here is a very old Vulcan Freeloader that we had to deal with recently. It failed on the customer and we tried to repair it, but were not able to due to lack of parts. So the customer was advised that they would need to replace the Vulcan with a new water heating system. As you can see in the pictures, this Vulcan was so old that the green color on the casing has actually faded to brown. Even we rarely see them in this state!

Is your Vulcan Freeloader dead? Check out our Vulcan Freeloader replacement deal here.