I feel lucky to have caught it. I had shirts that I’d left in the dryer overnight, and I went down into the basement to flip the dryer on for a few minutes to de-wrinkle them so I could wear one. When I came back about ten minutes later to take them out I noticed a trickle of water across the floor that hadn’t been there ten minutes before. It was coming from the bottom of the hot water heater. <\/p>\n
Learning about hot water heaters was another one of those things I’d never really appreciated, having spent nearly my whole life in rental apartments: just like a roof, the damn things will eventually start leaking. But unlike a roof, a hot water tank will leak with the force of your municipal water system pressure behind it. I’ve heard stories about those things failing all of a sudden and flooding basements, and between that and supply hoses on washing machines (which I’ve also heard these stories about) it’s kept me very nervous about my basement. Since I bought the house I’ve developed this tick of checking for leaks every time I go down there. \n<\/p>\n
So I turned off the hot heater and shut off the water supply to it. Then I called around for a replacement. I’d been hoping to replace the tank when it’s day came with one of those new "tankless" hot water heaters, not only because it appealed the techo-geek in me, but also the waste-not-want-not side of me. They don’t waste energy keeping a tank full of water sitting around at temperature waiting for you to use some. But when I asked I discovered that the price of one of those things, installed, was around four grand. Yikes! I’m still paying off the new furnace I had to buy last year. The top of the line water tank for my size house (just 40 gallons) cost eight-hundred installed. Which was still more then I’d expected to be shelling out this month. But better that then a flooded basement. I still feel lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I feel lucky to have caught it. I had shirts that I’d left in the dryer overnight, and I went down into the basement to flip the dryer on for a few minutes to de-wrinkle them so I could wear one. When I came back about ten minutes later to take them out I noticed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}