A Stitch in Time

• By Annette Parrish- Vice President

• We recently proved the old adage “a stitch in time saves nine”. For weeks our hot water has been coming out of the faucets looking like weak tea and there was a dried rust stain under one of the water heaters. Both of the heaters were also over ten years old. We’re smart people so we knew this meant that our water heaters were failing, and we had our plumber order two new heaters. We’re also frugal and busy so we thought we would wait a little longer and squeeze a little more service out of them. After all, money in the bank earns interest and we didn’t think they would fail before we got them replaced.

• When I ran out of hot water while taking a shower last Sunday, I knew something was wrong. Larry quickly ran down stairs and discovered one of the water heaters had failed. If you’ve never had a water heater fail, you may not know that ‘failing’ means they rust out at the bottom and then all the water inside them leaks onto the floor of your house, in our case 50 gallons of water! If the water heater is in a basement near a drain, and the floor slopes properly, hopefully most of the water will disappear and you will just have a little mopping up to do. If your water heater is on a second floor with finished rooms beneath it, you have major problems.

• Our floor in the basement doesn’t slope enough so the carpet in the basement was soaked for about four feet in and the water was about ½ inch deep in places. We also believe in being prepared, if not pro-active, so fortunately we have a water vacuum just for these emergencies. Needless to say, most of our morning was spent moving furniture, vacuuming and mopping up water, and tearing up carpet (which now needs to be replaced). The basement is trashed, we had to cancel our morning plans, and we have to spend hundreds of dollars we hadn’t planned on for new flooring.

• The real point here is that putting off replacing an old water heater never saves you time or money. If your heater is ten years old or older, just replace it now. You’ll have another ten years of peace of mind and not wonder every time you go on vacation whether or not you’ll come home to a wet basement. Trust me, it’s worth the peace of mind!

• We always welcome your comments, questions and suggestions. Please feel free to post in the “Comments Box” below.

An example of a water heater before & after replacing to a more energy-saving, headache preventing one.