first things first, i am not a complainer, no really, i'm not. Like most of you, i like a hot shower, hell, i'll even take a luke-warm or a cold shower once in a while as circumstances dictate, but this was rediculous..
as closing got closer and closer, i worked harder and harder to get the house ready... i painted. i floored. i hammered. i pulled out carpet. i put in carpet, i roofed. i packed. i unpacked ...and we finally decided it was move in day...
my lovely wife was the first to point it out, how i didn't notice it, i will never know. had i been working nights and weekends in the house for close to 6 months, and the whole time not once did i need hot water? there must have been some time that i required hot water.. Did it work and then stop working? Did it ever work?
well, i turned on a faucet and let the hot go for a few minutes, and lo and behold, hot water.. red, rusty, gritty hot water, but hot water.. after a minute or two, it cleared up.. a little, but it was still hot.
"There," i said, "Hot water,"
But she wasn't buying it, she said "I was in the bathroom, and there was no hot water." i told her to check again, and it worked.
later that night, she was bathing our brood, and again she yells down the stairs:
"NO HOT WATER!"
what? how? i go to the middle of the house, (right where a water heater should be, right?) and i open the closet under the stairs.. and the hot water heater "looks" fine. How should a hot water heater look? should it sit there and hum quietly? should it shake? should it have a little indicator on the top "HOT/COLD" with a dial or a light?
i listened, i tapped, i poked and prodded... i yelled up to her:
"HOW ABOUT NOW?" - knowing full well that i hadn't done anything to really fix the problem
She yelled back "We are going back to the old house until you fix the hot water!"
i told her that would put us behind schedule, that the buyers were coming in a few days... she said "I don't care, fix the water heater"
i called the owner, he said "We replaced the water heater when we moved in, it can't be more than 13 years old!" well, average life expectancy for most water heaters is 5 years.. This was my first indication that the previous owner didn't really do anything around the house..
so i had a plumber come and replace the water heater.. the coil was shorting in and out, so we had hot water "sometimes." i am surprised no one was electrocuted. when the plumber and i looked at the old water heater to gauge it's capacity, we saw that the installation date was 25 years in the past, when the house was first built.. the water heater was 25 years old, and the last owner didn't get a new heater, his plumber just replaced the coil....
