January 28th, 2008 - In-home water features
The best way to introduce today’s topic of conversation: Two Lumps Friday Jan 25 comic. Go on, take a moment to read it. (And yes, Michael, the title of this post is just for you!)
Saturday, the same thing happened to us, except I found it while getting apples from the basement fridge. (By the way 3 bushels of apples was NOT enough to last. I’ve barely eaten any this month and I probably have 40 apples left. Might last 2 more months.) The only good thing is that I procrastinated getting more apples all month due to not feeling well. Saturday afternoon, however, in the middle of a snack, I told myself to just go and do it. It would only take a couple minutes. Which stretch to 10 as I found the leak, mopped it up, got a flashlight, and figured out it was a fairly slow leak. [OK, in case the comic is gone or you didn’t look at it, our water heater is leaking.]
Since it was a Saturday afternoon, we chose to turn things off and not call a plumber. It’s not like the basement was flooded or anything. In fact, since it was so slow and not much more came out overnight, we turned everything back on yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, not soon enough as the water wasn’t actually hot when Eric took a shower. ooops. (In my defense, warm water did come out of the tap. I wasn’t going to waste more water waiting for the hot water to show up.)
I had hoped that when we had to redo the water heating, we could get a tankless or on-demand system. Unfortunately, those are more expensive to purchase and install–upwards of $2000.
Which, amazingly enough, is the amount of money that on Friday I confirmed we had. (This was going to be my post until the water issue.) We had saved about $4000 towards taxes, as I knew we’d owe a significant amount this year. In my estimated taxes, it was actually over $4000 and I was feeling bad about it. But then my W2 came in Thursday and the amount owed dropped in half! This is because I estimate based on my gross income while the W2 removes the pre-tax money like health insurance and retirement savings. What a pleasant surprise!
I was going to write about how we were going to be able to pay off the HEL another 2 months early, ie in April or May. But now we have to put the money to the plumber instead. But we won’t go for the more expensive route. I had been figuring 10 years down the line anyway–and as Eric says, when this new water heater goes in 10 years, then we can do it. I had no idea water heaters lasted 10 years or less or I would have planned better. Ours is 8 years old and we have really hard water so it’s no surprise really. Except that we were surprised. We may spend a bit extra to move the water heater. We did that once before–it was installed wrong and when the new furnance went int, they had to move it. Which means we have more than 10 feet of additional pipes in the basement. It takes a while for hot water to get upstairs. If we get a direct vent heater, perhaps it can be placed back closer to the sinks, laundry, toilets, and shower (which are all within a 6×6 area, I’d guess.
This marks the second time we have fortuitously gone to the basement within hours of a potentially major problem. We go to the basement about once a week so this is very
lucky! The other time was when the sewer backed up. We went down even less often back then as it was the first year and almost nothing was stored down there (thank goodness since anything on the floor was thrown out. Which amounted to a couple rugs.)
I have to go figure out what size water heater we should have. We are fairly low users (2 showers/week, 3-5 dishwashers/week, and one laundry/month) so we could use a small heater, I think. But we have to look to the future as well–we’ll have teens some day. On the other hand, only Maggie will be a teenager in 10 years!
February 8th, 2008 at 1:54 pm EST
solar experiment
Prodigal Sun
I can’t find any references, but when I was in college, the SJU library (or maybe St Ben’s’) had a book on — of all things — solar hot water heater around the turn of the century (primarily in California). They went out of style for two main reasons — (1) cheap, readily-available electricity, and (2) the water was so hot it caused a lot of burns.
!!!
And, er, why did I read an entire book on this subject in college? G-d only knows.
p.s. the title of this post? I hate you.