New Water Heater

Thank you all for your advice and recommendations on the water heater issue. The overwhelming majority of responses were to replace the water heater NOW and not wait until it failed.

I agree.

Those of you who know me well also know how frustrated I get doing projects around the house. I'm not a very good repair man. I'll get the job done, but it'll usually take me at least two trips to Home Depot and a lot of frustration.

Aside: For you non-submariners out there, an "A-Ganger" is an Auxiliary Division ("A-Gang") mechanic who keeps the hydraulics, diesel generator, plumbing and sanitary systems in working order.

I liked the idea a couple of you shared about finding an A-ganger to help me. Unfortunately, I don't know of any A-gangers in the DC area. A-gangers are awesome at what they do, unfortunately there aren't many requirements for A-gangers in the Pentagon. DC duty is mostly paperwork and powerpoint, and A-gangers and paperwork go together like oil and water - no offense intended! If we had been in a submarine home port, then that would have been a pretty good idea.

As I typically do with large purchases, I put together a spreadsheet to compare costs and features. I compared the water heaters at Home Depot, Lowes, and Sears.

In the end, I decided to go with Sears for two reasons: support for the military and cost.

First, I recently read an article about the Sears company's support of military members. If a Sears employee is deployed as a military reservist or national guardsman, then Sears will pay the difference between their Sears salary and their military salary and will maintain their Sears benefits while they're deployed. Based on that aspect alone, I probably would have chosen Sears even if they were priced a little more than the competition.

Tangent...

Before I jumped on that band-wagon, I wanted to make sure I was being fair. I didn't want to say I chose Sears because of their policy if Home Depot and Lowes were doing the same thing. So I did a little research.

To Home Depot's credit, they do make efforts to hire military veterans and dependents, but I could not find anything on their website that offered the benefits that Sears offers their military reserve employees.

On Lowes' website, I could not find anything about military reserves or national guard, and nothing came up for me on a Google search for "Lowes' military reserve" other than military discounts for customers shopping in the store.

End of Tangent

Okay, so given Sears' support of their employees in the reserves, I was predisposed to choosing Sears for our new water heater. However, when I added up all the installation costs, haul-away costs, county permits, etc, etc, Sears actually ended up coming out being the cheapest. It was only $12 cheaper than Lowes, and $50 cheaper than Home Depot, but it was still the lowest price (for a similar 50 gallon, natural gas water heater with a 12-year warranty).

I've had two friends recommend a tankless water heater, but I decided not to go tankless due to this article at Consumer Reports.

Someone else also mentioned not paying the extra for the longer warranty. In our last house, I totally agreed. We didn't expect to be there more than a few years, and I got the lowest priced, shortest warranty water heater. In this case though, I turned to another article at Consumer Reports. Given the place I am in my career, it is possible we could own and live in this house for a long time to come, and the longer warranty water heaters come with more design improvements as highlighted in the CR article.

The Sears guy came and installed the new water heater yesterday. He asked my wife, "What's wrong with old one?" She told him our story, and I don't think he agreed with the consensus of you folks here. I got the impression he thought we were nuts for replacing a functional water heater. Oh well - he's not the one who would have to clean up the mess when it blows, right?

Mission accomplished.

Preemption

We are developing a habit of buying ten year old houses.

First, let's rewind about seven years to when we owned our first house in San Diego. One day, we drove up the street to our house to find a waterfall cascading down the driveway. Our water heater was in the garage, and it had rusted a hole in the bottom and dumped its contents into the garage. Luckily, it was just the garage. Luckily there wasn't much on the floor in the garage, so the cleanup was fairly reasonable. Of course, it happened on a weekend, and Sears couldn't come to replace it until Monday, so we took showers at our next door neighbor's house that Sunday morning.

Fast forward about three years to our second house in Virginia. One of the things we love about living in Virginia is having a basement. We had enough money left over from selling our house in San Diego that we were able to hire a contractor to finish our basement in Virginia and put in a home theater, another full bathroom, etc.

Early one Saturday morning of a three-day weekend, my wife heard a noise sort of like a "whooooosh!" from the vicinity of the basement. Upon further inspection, we found our water heater decided it didn't like holding all that hot water anymore. It gave up the ghost.

I tell ya. There's nothing like spending the first day of your holiday weekend combating a flooding casualty in your house. I shut off the water supply isolation valve to the water heater, but that didn't stop the flooding in the basement. I figured it was because the isolation valve on the inlet of the water heater was leaking, so I shut off water to the entire HOUSE and opened some faucets low in the house to drain the system to stop the flooding in the basement.

Whew. The flooding is stopped. Now for the cleanup.

My wife and I spent the first half of the day just cleaning up the mess, sucking up water with the wet-dry shop vac, sopping up water with every towel we owned, and trying to figure out what was wrong with the sump pump.

Aside: Isn't it ironic how the only time we ever pay attention to our sump pump is when we REALLY NEED IT to be PUMPING and it's NOT? If we were in the Navy, we'd have some sort of PMS (Preventative Maintenance System) card that told us to check the pump to make sure it worked every 3 or 6 months.

We finally got to a point where the cleanup was mostly complete and the fans were running in the basement to dry out the carpet. We were then able to pause for a moment, take a deeeeep breath, and take stock of our situation.

Whew... cleanup mostly done. Now for system repair and restoration.

So there we were... Saturday of a three day weekend, not only with no HOT water but with NO water PERIOD. I called Sears, but they couldn't do anything until Tuesday. Then I called a dozen or more plumbers in the phone book, but most didn't answer.

The only plumber I could get on the phone that Saturday morning wanted me to sign a contract for ten years of indentured servitude and hand over my first born son in return for his services to come replace my water heater before Tuesday.

Ahhh, no thanks.

We spent that holiday weekend taking showers at our next-door neighbor's house and eating out every meal. We took some buckets of water home to use for flushing the toilets.

I learned something new that weekend. My good friend Vince came over and taught me how to "sweat" copper pipe and install a new valve.

On the first trip to Home Depot, I bought a new isolation valve, flux, the flux brush, and solder, and Vince brought over his propane torch. Once we got the new isolation valve installed and allowed the joint to cool for a couple of hours, we said a prayer, crossed our fingers, and held our breath as we turned the water back on in the house to see if the repair was a success.

It was.

Well... sort of.

Actually... not really.

The new valve Vince had installed was holding just fine, but we reinitiated the flooding casualty as water started pouring out the hole in the bottom of the water heater again. It turns out, the source of the flooding was NOT the isolation valve on the INLET side of the water heater.

I learned something else new through that experience.

Ya know that valve in your shower that has one handle to both turn the water on and control the temperature? Yyyyeah, they're not so good at ISOLATION. In fact, they're DESIGNED to allow water to leak by from the cold side to the hot side as an anti-scalding safety feature. The unintended consequence is that this allows cold water from the water main to go up to the showers in the house, leak by to the hot side, come down the hot pipes into the OUTLET of the water heater, and leak out the rusted hole in the bottom of our busted water heater.

Aside: I think there's some unwritten universal law that no home repair project can be accomplished in ONE trip to Home Depot.

Since there was no isolation valve on the outlet of the water heater, I had to make yet another trip to Home Depot and buy ANOTHER isolation valve and Vince let me borrow his pipe saw. I cut out a section of the pipe on the outlet side of the water heater and installed a new isolation valve.

I dug up this old picture off my Palm Pilot. On the right is the isolation valve that Vince showed me how to install. On the left is my own handy work from installing the isolation valve on the outlet of the water heater.

Once I got the outlet isolation valve installed, we said a another prayer, crossed our fingers and held our breath again, and turned the water back on in the house to see if the isolation held.

Thankfully, it did.

Whew... cold water restored to the house. Now we can at least use the toilets.

We made it through the weekend continuing to use our neighbor's shower and eating out so we didn't have to wash any dishes. On Tuesday, we got Sears to come install a new water heater for somewhere in the ballpark of $600.

GETTING TO THE POINT

So why am I telling you all this?

We have just purchased yet another ten-year old house with the original water heater in the (nicely finished) basement.

During the home inspection prior to closing, the professional home inspector told us he was worried about the water heater. It's old and it's making noises indicative of scale buildup inside, and he recommended replacing it.

We tried asking the sellers to replace it, but they said no. It works. It doesn't leak. It's fine.

Our realtor told us, it'll be fiiiiiine. If it does "break," then your home warranty will cover it.

So here's the question: Should we...

A) WAIT until the water heater BLOWS and floods the basement like our previous two houses on the premise that the home warranty will pay for it? (I'm sure they'll come up with SOME excuse why it isn't covered.)

B) SAVE the time and effort of cleaning up the mess in the basement and just go ahead and pay out of pocket to replace the water heater NOW?

C) Implement some risk-mitigation strategy and install a kiddie-pool under or around the water heater and do daily operational checks on the sump pump?

What say you peanut gallery?