She's gonna blow!

We had a scare with the hot water heater last night, and it may not be over yet. But let's start at the beginning of the story. About 2 weeks ago I turned up the temperature on the hot water heater because I kept running out of hot water during my showers (I told you I had a problem!). Then we installed the new shower head, and since it uses less water the hot water lasts longer, part of the beauty of it! Anyway, yesterday I went in to turn the temperature back down and noticed a puddle on the floor. I figured it was because I had mucked with the temp and if I turned it back down things would be OK. So I did that and went back a few hours to check on it and all was dry. I figured I would try the pressure release valve to see if it worked and to make sure that there wasn't excess pressure from the raising of the temperature over the past couple of weeks. Well that was my mistake! I flipped the little lever and water started coming out, I flipped it back and it was stuck open! It wasn't gushing, but it was dribbling. Our water heater is at least 12 years old, and every where you look it is rusty and looks like it was the worlds original water heater.

So Bridget and I consulted the water heater experts, Tom and Melissa, and decided that we should maybe go price out a new one just in case this one was about dead (always better to do ahead of time rather than after the basement is flooded!). The experts at Home Depot said a new water heater started at about $300, and install began at $250 but you needed to do 5 things in addition to that $250 including pulling a city permit, installing earthquake straps, installing an expansion chamber, paying for all of the new fittings and flexible connections, and something else. Anyway after all that was said and done it would be closer to $400 to install a $300 water heater.

Faced with that looming expense we decided to at least try the $5 fix and replace the pressure relief valve. This was not as easy as I thought it was going to be. First off I do not own a great pipe wrench that could bite into the pipe that goes from the valve to the ground. I tried and I tried, and I cussed and I cussed. So I went on to plan B, I thought If I could just get the valve off with the pipe attached I would just buy a new pipe and be done with it. Well the pipe was about 4 feet long, and spinning it all the way around wasn't going to happen. So I got my pipe cutter and managed to cut the pipe down to about 2 or 2 and a half feet long. That seemed to be prefect until I started to spin it around, when it got to the top it hit an air duct! So I thought "no big deal I'll just cut the pipe again" well my pipe cutter broke about half way through the new cut! So I went to plan C, I removed the air duct! From there I was able to spin the pipe which was attached to the relief valve and removed it easily and put on the new one lickity split! Reassembling the air duct was painless and it was fixed. The floor was pretty much dry when we went to bed, and was still dry this morning. We are keeping our fingers crossed that all is well in water heater land, but I still think that the whole thing needs to be replaced at some point.