Water Heaters

Over the last few weeks some pretty amazing things happened.  There was the water heater thing for starters.  Ok, to say “thing” is a pretty overbroad, ambiguous term.  There was the water heater “I’m going to stop working and leak all over your basement” issue.  Better?  More descriptive anyway.

Like Chonathan mentioned earlier we woke up one morning and BAM! no hot water.  Not really the best thing to discover, not helped by the fact we had already figured out that there would be no heat that day either (more on that one later). So picture this:

Saturday morning getting ready for another tireless day of random work on the house and:

“Jessle – why is the water only luke warm?”

“Uhhhh”

“Hmmmm”

“Let me take a look” cue the Jessle wandering down the basement stairs with a flashlight like she knows a damn about hot water heaters.  Then cue the Jessle picking up the phone and calling the oil company.

<phone call reenactment”

“Hello oil Company – my hot water heater is busted.”  Jessle wandering around the house in her pj’s waiting for Chonathan to come home with the Dunkin coffee

“Uh, yea, an electric water heater?… not our problem.  Call a plumber maybe?”  The guy was actually much more helpful then that – but that’s what it sounds like at 8am and your hot water is busted up and you don’t have a clue as to what you should be doing.

Next phone call?  Dad:

<yet another phone call reenactment”

“Hey Dad.  Um. We have a problem”

“Ok – what’s up?”

“The hot water doesn’t work”

“O-K”

The beautiful thing is that Dad’s come over and help fix things.  And my Dad is no exception.  He came over, took a look and says a bunch of stuff that really made a whole lot of sense at the time and boiled down to Cho and me needing to replace the lower element and one of the thermostats.  Dad and I truck off to Home Depot, land of everything home repair, right?  WRONG. Oh so very very wrong.  Home Depot does not have the heating elements for older style models, i.e. the 25 year old, Hydrostone P.O.S. in the basement.  So we couldn’t complete the repair on day one.  Fast forward a week and my awesome Dad managed to get the correct element from a plumbing supply place and came back to put it in.  The install went flawlessly (as far as we can tell), but after 3 hours the water tank started hemorrhaging water all over the basement.

This was just about when Chonny and I started honestly questioning our home owner merit but our steal was still to be tested.  Lions and tigers have nothing on sump pumps and furnaces.  Ain’t Got Nothing…

**Cho Edit: This is a really shitty picture of an even shittier water heater that we ultimately decided to replace. Note the torn up insulation around it that happens to be saturated in the sludge that leaked out of it when we tried to repair the damned thing.