I’ve been noticing for a while now that I don’t need to turn on the cold water to moderate my shower water temperature. Okay, I dunno, maybe somebody “bumped” the temperature control on the water heater again…

Last week, I went down to the Dungeon to do something with laundry and SPLISH! Oh no! There’s water down here. Again. Now, we get a little freaked out about water in the dungeon these days. We have never had a wet basement. Nothing like the one at my original childhood house on Superior Street. At one point I can remember my parents panicking because there was at least a FOOT of water in that basement. It was a horribly typical “Michigan” basement with a Silence of the Lambs type room in it and everything. Mostly nothing valuable was stored down there. Except for the furnace and the washer and dryer…

Here at the Landfill? Finished basement. Ugly as all getout but still finished. But then, the last few years, water would leak through the south wall whenever we had a big rainstorm and pool in front of the dryer. I would be hauling a bunch of laundry down there and SPLOOSH! I would step in it. After a few years and some DIY attempts at solutions, we finally contracted with Terra Firma to come out and do the job right. They did and water doesn’t come in any more. Still, when I SPLISHED last week, I immediately looked for the source. Whew! It wasn’t coming in the wall. No, it was coming from under the water heater.

Things got precipitately worse this morning and I had to turn off the hot water before I went to work. Oh, that was fun. Crappy breaking-up phone convo between the GG and KW: “The handle is YELLOW!” “No it’s not, it’s RED!” “Which WAY do I turn it!” Lather, rinse, repeat. It WAS red (top picture) and I turned it clockwise.

So. $900 for a new water heater (and no, that was NOT what the $1000 check was for).

I knew that it had been a loooonnng time since we bought the OLD water heater. It was back in the day when Mouse was just barely old enough to be left home alone for an hour or two if we were going to be close by. I don’t know if it was the day that we got this old water heater or not but it was right around then. I remember coming home from driving Lizard Breath somewhere. The GG was at a school meeting (the school is in the backyard). Mouse and Froggy were hovering at the top of the Dungeon stairs trying to muster up enough courage to go *downstairs* to get something. I understood. I remember feeling that way about my own childhood basement too. I was glad she didn’t get down there though because her BIRTHDAY PRESENTS were down there and not all of them were WRAPPED!

But 19 years? Yes…

Anyway, old water heater and new water heater. And since water heaters are REALLY boring things to take pictures of, you get a gratuitous shot of one of our old MacPlus computers back there (and some other junk). By the way, the NEW water heater has a YELLOW handle!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 11th, 2013 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.