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February 5, 2001 |
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There are things that people do everyday that we never really think about.
Today would be one of those days when you might start to think about it.
I'm not talking about normal everyday things like brushing your teeth; I'm
talking about the type of thing that someone does everyday and
it's not really all that noteworthy… until you have to do it. In this
case it is installing a water heater.
I suppose it is a bit ironic that one of the things they typically
enumerate when it comes to civilization is hot and cold running
water. It's funny what you take for granted.
I think I've shared with you the dilemma of my water heater. It hasn't
exploded, nor does it seem like it will anytime soon. It is not leaking
gallons of water. It is correctly heating water. The one thing that it
is doing out of the ordinary is that it is leaking water,
albeit a bit slowly… so slowly in fact, that one might not notice that
much, save for the puddle in the hallway immediately after my taking a
shower.
The problem was that replacing a water heater costs about $500. The water
heater itself is only about $150-$200; the remainder of the charge was
labor. Labor?! That's right… Labor You can start
to see the wheels churning here, I'm sure. Replacing a water heater can't
be all that difficult. I mean, it can't be $350 difficult. So I
figured that I would try to install it myself. I'm fairly crafty; I mean,
I understand most machinery and am fairly good with tools. It can't be
that bad.
You know there's a reason why they charge $350 for installation…
As you might imagine, the first thing to do is to remove the old heater. If you're not familiar what a water heater might look like, it is a large cylinder with two pipes running through it. Mine is about four feet tall and close to two feet in diameter with a capacity of fifty gallons. Now, I carried the new one in, so it really isn't that heavy. Awkward, yes… Heavy, no.
Another instrumental difference between the old water heater and the newer one is, well, the water. The older filled heater has the additional heft of fifty gallons of water, after doing some short calculations that comes to an additional 85.5 pounds of weight. You can add 85.5 pounds to just about any household item, say a hairbrush, and it will be considerably bulkier.
The trick to moving the old heater, of course, is to empty it. Though it is also problematic to try to drain fifty gallons of hot water, so you have to drain all the hot water first, then empty the cooler water from the tank. There's drain valve at the bottom of the heater for precisely this purpose. Unfortunately, this had broken off on my old heater and I replaced it with another one; one that drains considerably slower. [Sigh!] Story of my life.
So half the night was spent draining this sucker, at least enough so that I could at least move it. This is when I noticed just how rusted it had become. It's a wonder it hadn't leaked earlier. There are three things that attach to a water heater: the cold water supply, the hot water output, and the electrical connection. There are three wires to the electrical connection. After disconnecting all of these, I slowly rolled the old decrepit. Okay, rolled is not quite accurate, waddled is probably closer to the truth.
I took the new heater out of its box and moved it to its new home. Immediately, I saw the first problem. The older heater had these two small sections of pipe that extended from the top and connected to the flexible tubing that went into the wall. The newer heater didn't have these. I had hoped that the new heater would have it in its box, but it didn't. After examining the manual, I came to find that these short sections of pipe, each about three inches long, were called nipples. I cannot make this up. Normally, I would simply take the nipples from the older heater, but there were no easy means of taking them off. The pipe was smooth, so you could not grip it with a conventional wrench, and I didn't have a pipe wrench.
Then I saw my second problem. There were three wires connecting the water heater to the electrical supply: Ground, a red wire, and a black wire. Unfortunately, the colors on the water heater didn't correlate to the colors of the connecting wire… and I hadn't labelled them. [Sigh!]
So I'm presented with the following condition. Lack of supplies and lack of information. I did what any engineer would do at 2am and lacks a water heater. I went to the hardware store. I had remembered that Lowe's hardware stored opened 24 hours. "Opened" being the instrumental word here, since I came to discover that they no longer opened 24 hours. I only knew of one other nearby hardware store… Home Depot.
As luck would have it, it was opened 24 hours. I wandered in. I looked for the nipples (or fittings) for the water heater. I found them easily. I also asked some of the folks who worked there about the wire connections. As it so happens, apart from the ground connection, the other two wires are interchangeable.
I found that after attaching the nipples to the heater and then the flexible pipe to the nipples, there were some leaks along the seals. I thought that maybe I hadn't used enough teflon tape to get a good seal, so I tried sealing it with more tape and more carefully. I gave up after about half a dozen attempts and decided I needed a couple of rubber washers to get a better seal… washers which I didn't have.
Thirty minutes later, I wandered the aisles of Home Depot again, looking for these rubber washers. I also picked up some plumbing putty, which would hopefully do the trick. It was a relatively short trip.
I returned home to try my new theory… one which I'm sorry to say, ultimately failed. The rubber washers had little effect on the condition of the seals. I hoped that the plumbing putty would do the trick, though it takes some time to it to dry properly. So I set it and went to sleep. I turned off the cold water supply, but turned on the electrical supply. In essence, this allowed me to heat the water, but prevented the water from leaking since there was no pressure in the pipes. I suppose it pays off to be an engineer and understand some of these things.
In the morning, I found that the pipe still leaked. [Groan!] I went off to work thinking about what might have gone wrong. It took me some time to finally figure it all out, but it finally sinked in. I had only tightened the nipples by hand. That sounds so dirty, doesn't it? I later bought a pipe wrench and tightened the nipples. They stayed.
I suppose the moral of the story is… Hands are not sufficient when tweaking nipples.
February 5, 2001