I was off work last Friday and so Susan and I had planned a day trip to Tulsa. While getting ready that morning I hopped in the shower and noticed there was no hot water. In one of our older houses we owned a hot water heater with a pilot light that was constantly going out, although we haven’t had that problem in either of our last two houses. I got pretty good at relighting it and wasn’t too worried about restarting this one before we left for the day.
A few minutes later Susan discovered the real problem, which wasn’t the pilot light. Water was spraying out of the top of our hot water heater and spilling out into the garage. We turned off our water to the house and called our go to plumbers to come assess the situation. Obviously, our trip to Tulsa got cancelled and instead we spent the day staying near the house, waiting for the plumber to arrive.
Our house is five years old and also, we assumed, was our hot water heater. We learned our hot water heater came with a six-year warranty, but there is always the possibility that the home builder bought a stockpile of hot water heaters and had them sitting in storage for a while prior to using them. That didn’t turn out to be the case and the hot water heater was still under warranty. I got real excited about that until I learned that warranties like that are prorated. When they said the hot water heater was under warranty what I heard was “free,” but the process turned out to be pretty far from free. Really what it meant was that the replacement and installation only cost us a little over a thousand dollars instead of a little over two thousand dollars.
While inspecting our old hot water heater the plumber kept repeating, “I’ve never seen this happen before.” It appears the unit failed due to poor installation which, based on other issues we’ve had with this house, is not particularly surprising. The connections on top of the tank were not connected properly and there was evidence that the tank has been leaking for quite some time. Our next door neighbor told me his hot water heater failed after seven years. His house was also build by Four Corners, or as I jokingly refer to them, Four Cut Corners.
Things could have been worse. Back in the late 90s after Susan and I moved back from Spokane, we had the hot water tank in our house completely fail. The bottom of the tank rusted through, sending 30 gallons of water into both the garage and our bedroom, completely soaking the carpet and making a big mess.
In our current house, the plumber said there was evidence that our tank had been failing for quite some time. The tank sits inside a closet we never open on top of a large wooden platform, and so it’s possible the tank has been leaking water down into the area we never see. Once the seal had completely failed, it was much easier to see the water, which was running out onto our driveway.
While replacing the tank, our plumber showed us where the hot water cut off was inside the closet. Turning off water to the entire house was overkill, but it’s what we knew how to do.
A couple of hours and one fat check later and we were all set with our new hot water heater. We didn’t make it to Tulsa, but we did celebrate by taking warm baths and showers later that evening.
Water heaters used to last decades :(
I feel your pain :-)
I like in a condo that uses a common boiler to supply about a dozen units. It took almost 4 days to get hot water restored, and then the new unit failed after about 12 hours of service. It took 2 more days to get parts.
The real bummer is that labor and supply prices have almost doubled. The same job that was $12,000 in 2019 cost over $20,000 in 2023. I’m unfortunate enough to serve on our board so I get to see all these bills.