Frustration, Comedy, and Water Appliances, Part 2
This is Part 2 of the comedy of errors surrounding my utility closet.
Part 1 | Part 3
After the "poopy water" incident, our pantry/utility closet enjoyed 19 months of peace.
Sidebar:
The reason for the "pantry/utility closet" combination is that the rooms are adjacent, and the house's original water configuration spread into both of them:
That peace ended in September 2022. Days before a week-long trip to Colorado (and while my wife was 8 months pregnant), our minivan's1 alternator failed for the second or third time2. We rented a Toyota 4Runner3, planning to repair our van first thing on our return.
Instead, we got home and found that our house's water heater had failed and dumped water all over the floor.
(I was at least able to laugh at this one as it happened. I scared my mom though: while texting her about the triple whammy of Nearly-Full-Term Wife/Dead Alternator (again)/Exploding Water Heater, my new phone wasn't sending all of my laughing emojis. So she thought I was getting depressed and overwhelmed instead of finding the whole thing hilarious)
On the upside, this wasn't my first time installing a water heater. The downside was that I needed my van in order to haul a new one home. The downside's upside was that I'd gotten pretty good at replacing the van's alternator by this point, so that was more of an annoyance than anything.
With the van repaired and a new heater acquired, my father-in-law came over to help me remove the old one. It didn't go cleanly; the tank was wedged in behind a series of obstacles:
- The house's incoming water line
- The furnace
- The A/C condensate line
- The copper pipes that went through the wall to where the water heater used to sit
We gave in and uninstalled the furnace in order to get the water heater out.
To avoid further water damage, I opted to install the new water heater in the garage. This began a lifelong love for PEX tubing, but it also meant that all of our faucets started taking longer to get hot.
What I didn't know was that this event had kicked off some mold growth in the crawl space. Nor did I know that this was still not the worst experience I would have with our house's water appliances...
(to be continued...)