Water Heater Bites the Dust

Guess what I woke up to this morning? A busted water heater!! After waking up early (not having to rush to work), I was greeted with my sister making me breakfast, and it’s was not even my birthday. So you know I was thinking this is going to be a great day. It’s Friday, expecting great weather because the weatherman forecasted today’s high in the lower 90's with a chance of late evening showers and I was going to eat Vietnamese food today with a good friend. So, imagine my surprise when I walked in the garage and discover this…

So I’m thinking, no problem, I have a home warranty that will cover that. I call American Home Shield and they tell me a pluming company will call me when they can come out and I just have to pay the $60 service fee. I’m thinking, not too bad, this isn’t going to break the bank, I tried turning the water heater off at the source but it wouldn’t budge, it had collected years of rust. When that failed I looked for the main shutoff valve for the whole house. Nope not touching that, it’s buried deep and I am not getting dirty. So I made a judgment call, thinking that the leak is slow the house whouldn’t flood, right! Feeling semi-sure about my decision, I go to work thinking they will call me in the next hour or two.

I was WRONG . . . They call me to say they were coming by the house at 3:45 pm. Remember,  I called AHS at 7:15 am and the pluming company later on when they opened for business at 8:15 am.

The electrician from Rescue Rooter Pluming comes out and said that my water heater (circa 1980) was dead, like I didn’t know that, and he will have to call the home warranty people to see what they want to do. Well, they authorize the new water heater but I will have to pay … Get this … $936 on top of the $60 service fee. Apparently the old water heater was not to city code and it is my responsibility to get it to code, the home warranty company doesn’t cover that. So I call my sister and we both empty out our saving to get it fixed.

I need HOT water, COLD shows…. No way!!!

 I will have to take off again later on so the city’s inspector can come by and confirm that the work was done to code. The tech said it will take him about 4 hours to install.

Trying to see the positive side of this, I have a new $1000 water heater, its energy efficient and per the technician top of the line resident water heater (apparently you can’t even get this type of heat at Lowes or Home Depot) so he says, finally it should improve the home’s resale value, I hope.

Here is the finished work

 Ciao,