Thursday, November 5, 2009

Tales from the utility room...

About 2 years ago, Mr. Crackers & I bought ourselves a new water heater from a store that we'll call Smears. We've bought a lot of appliances from this company over the years (including a water heater that we installed in our previous home) and never had a problem until Mabel came into our lives (I have decided for no particular reason that I am going to refer to our water heater as Mabel for the rest of this post. It's just been one of those kind of days...)




Now Mabel (the water heater) worked really well for the first 2 months after we got her. We had hot water when we needed it & we never gave her a second thought.



Apparently though, Mabel was getting lonely & decided she needed some additional attention. So she decided that she would shut herself down overnight so that Mr. Crackers & I would be faced with an ice cold shower the following morning. This way she could ensure that we no longer took her powers of heating water for granted & would stop down and pay her a visit from time to time.

It didn't take more than a few days of cold showers for Mr. Crackers & I to call up our local Smears repairman to see what was going on. He came out & declared that the problem was that dirt & debris was getting into the water heater Mabel & causing the pilot light to shut off. All we had to do, he said, was get down on our bellies & use a shower brush to clean the screen near the pilot light and then use a vacuum cleaner to suck it all out.

Oh, is that all??



To me this seemed seemed a little strange, since I had lived on my own for almost 20 years & had never had to do this before. When I conveyed this sentiment to the Smears repairman, he said that these new water heaters were extra sensitive & that as long as we regularly cleaned her out that we could expect Mabel to have a long and healthy life.





And so, I got down on my belly every few weeks to clean out Mabel's nether regions with a shower brush (see exhibit A above). And every evening for the next 18 months, I would check the pilot light on the water heater before I went to bed.



But despite the cleanings & my vigilant checking of the pilot light, Mr. Crackers & I spent the next 18 months playing a game of Russian roulette "the shower edition". We'd have weeks go by where hot water was plentiful & we rejoiced in our warm morning shower. Then, randomly we would wake up (even though I checked the pilot light the night before) & we'd be faced with water cold enough to freeze the tenders off a polar bear.




Finally, after the frequency of the cold showers started to wear on us, I called the local Smears repairman again. He came to the house & after a quick check told us "Oh, it's the pilot light assembly. That has gone bad on a lot of these models. All we have to do is just change that out & everything should work again for you."



I told him our story about the ritual cleaning of the water heater & he shot me a look that said "Hey there crazy, do you mind leaving the utility room so I can get to work actually fixing your problem?" So I left him to his repairs feeling a little silly for having spent the past 18 months cleaning a water heater whose actual problem was a malfunctioning pilot light assembly. But, as long as the problem was fixed and we had hot water, I was ready to let bygones be bygones.




After that last visit, all was well again for a couple of months until.... yep, you guessed it, once again we were facing arctic morning showers. Needless to say, Mr. Crackers & I were starting to get more than a little cranky about the whole water heater problem. Mabel was definitely becoming a gigantic thorn in my ever widening backside.



I told the third Smears repairman all of our woes the moment he set foot in our house. I led him downstairs to the utility room explaining what had occurred at all of the previous visits & told him that we were really, really tired of the cold showers. As I turned to leave him to his job, he stopped me & said "Don't move! I can tell what your problem is just by looking at your hot water heater. Come over here."

I figured he was some kind of hot water heater whisperer or something. Clearly this man had a gift. I walked over to the water heater & looked where he was excitedly pointing. Apparently the problem as our flue. It was not venting properly. He could tell that by all the SCORCH marks on the top of the poor old Mabel. When I looked, I discovered he was right - Poor Mabel's topside had 4 distinct scorch marks. Yikes!



After receiving this concerning news we called our HVAC guy to look at Mabel's flue & since he was there we asked him to go ahead & do the annual service on our furnace. The furnace was rapidly approaching the 20 year mark & we'd been hoping to extend the life of it a bit by making sure we got serviced and checked every year.



Well, the good news was that the flue was going to be easy to repair, the bad news was that our furnace looked like it was not going to quite make it through the winter.



"How bad is it?" I asked. "Are we right on the edge of needing a new furnace?"



The repairman looked at me kindly (& kid of pityingly) and said. "Well, let me put it this way: your toes are already over the edge and you are starting to lose your balance. Even a slight breeze could push you right over. My recommendation is that you start thinking about a new furnace."



It's a good thing we had a lot of cash lying around the house that we didn't know what to do with. Oh wait... I must have gotten us confused with another family. We didn't have piles of cash, but we did have a problem that needed a serious solution. After the initial panic subsided, we were able to secure a short term interest free loan from the bank of kind-hearted and generous family members (or KHGFM).



After receiving many bids & getting many worried looks from HVAC contractors who left our house after seeing our furnace asking us "You have a working CO monitor right?" We finally got a new furnace (& AC unit since that was also teetering very close to end of it's natural life) installed yesterday.



Here it is....TA DA!



Isn't it beautiful?

OK, I know it's pretty utilitarian looking. Man, you'd think for all the money these things cost they could make them look a little prettier. I mean can we add a little color here? How about red, or even a nice chocolate brown color?


I'm thinking of hanging Christmas lights on it...what do you think? We spent so much money that I feel like we should be doing more with it than just using it to heat our house. I'm considering using it as a backdrop for our annual Christmas Card portrait.


We'll save the new AC unit for the Easter pictures this spring.

Oh and by the way, we had hot water this morning for our shower thanks to Mabel and her brand new flue.

1 comment:

momevers said...

Thanks for the morning laugh, Karen.