our lil’ chunk of hell

an alternate title:

how to spend $1,200.00 before 9am on a monday

so sunday i’m at the shop and all is cool…until i check my phone. i’ve got a text from the ufc with several pics attached. this is not uncommon – typically it’s one of the dogs doing something cute, or one of the many squirrels we’ve semi-adopted in our back yard doing something funny.

but in THIS case, it was water flowing across the floor of our utility room between the hot water heater and the washing machine. that’s not cool. i called immediately to walk her through where the drain valve was to hook a hose to it, but she tried that with a screw driver and it wouldn’t turn (it didn’t have a handle, just a screw):

i walked her through how to build a better screwdriver with my socket set over the phone, but all that did was bend said screw. when i offered to leave work and come home she accurately pointed out that all i was gonna do was bend it worse of break it, and the water would keep on trickling. she had several towels set up to absorb it, and it would keep till i got home. sure as you’re born, when i got home i snapped the fucker, but by then it had slowed to almost nothing, and we just had to ride out sunday night with no hot water.

monday morning went, in my opinion, the way dealing with businesses in small towns should go. i called a plumber at 8:00 in the morning and he called me back around 8:30. by 9am he was at the house, and he had to literally break the drain valve off to install a new one so we could drain out the water. turns out the old one had a wee bit o’ sediment built up in it.

while he did that i was supposed to go to lowe’s (about 45 minutes from the house) but instead checked a local hardware store (five minutes or less from the house) and it turned out they only had one in stock – but it was gas (check!) and 50 gallon (check!) and $619 (which with my birthday being 6/19, i saw as the third check) and it was delivered to the house in fifteen minutes for an additional twenty bucks.

once it was drained my boy daren got everything unhooked from the old one…

and i helped him haul out the old one to the driveway…

i can’t remember how long i’ve had this one, but i think we looked at the sticker on it and figured it from some time in the late 1990’s. we got the new one in pretty easily, but i gotta tell you, it was HOT for a day or two. i had to turn this fucker down to the lowest setting, and i figure it’s got one of those new cores literally made from hell:

but boy does it get the job done. considering i’ve been told by multiple plumbers that, due to the hard water out here, you’re lucky if the best of water heaters lasts ten years, and that last one lasted over twenty, i got lucky. we’ll see how well this one does. it seems bigger (i swore the old one was a fitty), and it’s certainly hotter thanks to the hell core, so hopefully it fades away before it burns out. it’s not a rock star, it’s a water heater, damn it!