I woke this morning…and laid in bed watching my SG1 DVD for a while since it was Saturday. Then I got up, made some coffee, grabbed the newspaper and relaxed for a while. At 9:00 I called my friend Adele to see when she wanted to bleed the brakes on her MGB, and then started to get ready to go out and look at a car I wanted (more about that in another post, leave it at “10 MPG was killing me” for now).
I brushed my teeth and turned on the water to wait for it to be warm enough to rinse with. And waited. and waited. And turned the cold water off completely and waited. And waited. And thought “Oh, suminabeech, I just bought that water heater 3 or 4 years ago” and headed down to the basement with a mouth full of toothpaste to see what was wrong.
That’s what was wrong. No the water heater hadn’t sprung a leak, fortunately. The flex pipe coming out of it had, shooting water up in a arc, drenching the underside of the kitchen floorboards. And it had been spewing water out into the basement for who knows how long.
Fortunately, it’s a dug out basement, and not completely dug out, so the water pretty rapidly soaks right into the ground, even though the dugout part does have a concrete floor. By 5:00 PM the floor was pretty dry. And since this has happened before, as you can see in the picture below everything is either on the shelf or in a waterproof container.
So I head out to Home Depot to get a new flex hose. Come home, take off the old one and put on the new one. Great, the water problem is fixed, but at this point it’s only around 11:00 and there is too much water on the floor to restart the hot water heater. So, I go help my friend with her car, which went quite smoothly. We have some dinner and I head back to my house to see if I can get the water heater going again. (Keep in mind, by this point I’ve worked on a water heater and a car, and have no hot water to take a shower. Anybody want to come over and cuddle tonight?)
Well (hopefully it’s as simple as) things are still too soggy for me to get the pilot light going. I’m going to have to let it dry out overnight and hope that it starts up tomorrow. Even if it does, I’m not going to have hot enough water to take a shower until sometime in the afternoon.
Wish me luck, and if nobody comes by for the next couple days, I won’t blame ya.
