Anode rods are consumable. Did you personally see the rod itself during the inspection?

They also don't repair damage. A really mean thing to do would be to replace the anode on a nearly-dead water heater right before selling a house. The minute the anode finishes rusting away, the heater could let go.

I've... Never had a problem that was catastrophic in my adult life. Only real issue we've ever had was someone hit the ac unit with their car.

Curious what sort of load you put on yours to have such terrible luck.

I had one catastrophic failure and several minor ones. Now I have a tankless water heater.

Where I'm from mostly installations have a 2 inch deep drip pan which you place a water detector. It emits a very loud noise if the bottom of it gets wet

ex. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Basement-Watchdog-Battery-Operat...

This doesn't help for catastrophic failures but for leaks it should.

> one year of my life that my HVAC system didn't break down in some fashion

Something’s wrong here. I’ve only seen 1 partial failure (a refrigerant leak reduced efficiency by 5x, but the AC still worked) in the last 15 years across several houses. You’ve got an order of magnitude more failures.

Do you live on a boat? :P

Hydronic heating system[1] (hot water running under the floors) that was incompetently installed. No expansion tanks, wrong pipes used (no oxygen barrier so oxygen seeped in and rusted the cast iron pump), pressure wasn't balanced, just tons of issues.

My current house's HVAC system was also done piss poorly in places and there can be a 15 degree difference between rooms, so that's going to be 10k+ to fix. Fun times.

[1]Despite the obscene maintenance costs, the luxury is worth it. Warm floors are really nice!