Misty Acre and The Water Heater

Misty Acre

My dad gave us this house in the hopes that it would save us money.  We were living in an apartment that the landlord was raising our rent by $50.00 once a month and it had been 3 months and we couldn't afford anything else at the time. The carpet was bad and the dishwasher broke down and the landlord didn't fix it unless we bought the carpet ourselves....on top of the raise in our rent. So my daughter went to my parents, unbeknownst to us and told my dad about our problems and he wanted to give us this house. I wrote about that horrible experience earlier in this blog and don't want to re-hash all of that nonsense.

We moved in and we knew that some things needed upgraded to pass the new codes they had passed years ago.  We waited about a year and a half until we got our finances under control.  I was working for a company that did landscaping and other building projects.  They were out of state but they did come and take a look at the one pier that was holding up our house.  I am getting off the subject and will have to write a book about this house later.  Anyway they came out and raised the house on that corner and put a new pier under the house.  I will tell more about that when I get to telling the whole story of this house.

That was our first nice encounter with a contractor/employer.  Anyway, let me get back to the Water Heater.

We shopped around for a contractor to fix the house and bring all the plumbing and electrical work up to code.  My parents had this house as a cabin, but we needed to bring it up to something that we could live in all the time.  So we shopped around and got references and all that jazz.

Keeping to the story here, we had floods in the basement many times.  It was for my sewing business, that never happened here because of the locality of it.  Anyway, we had another contractor come and see where the flooding was coming from.  This was many months ago.  He looked it over and couldn't really find anywhere where the water was coming in.  We cleared out all the gutters and the big black plastic pipes that they put around the basement to catch and divert any waters from the basement.  They were dry.  We were confused.  It only flooded when it rained really hard.  So we had no idea where it was coming from.

Current water heater's place.

One day about 2 months ago, it hadn't rained in a week and was really dry.  My husband took the laundry basket down and found water in the basement.  It was about an inch and so the only thing down there was the water heater, the wash/dryer and the de-humidifier.  We knew it wasn't the washer because I hadn't used that in a week.  The only other thing that it has to have been was the Water Heater.

Easy enough to go to Lowes and get a new one and for them to come and install it and take this old one away.  I had a credit card with them and was going to use that.  So we go to the store and pick out one to replace the broken one.  No problem at all.

The plumber comes out and looks around and tells us that he cannot put it in.  WHAT!!!
He tells us the electrical wiring is not the right size and we will have to get an electrician to come out and put the correct wiring in.  Well, that sounded easy enough but I was fuming.  I blamed the country for changing the codes so many times....and they had....but that wasn't the problem.  I fumed some more.  I was hot and I could have made hot water from that point myself.

We went back the day the contractor brought all our new hot water tanks and fixings out to return it because we didn't have a place to store all that until we could get an electrician to come out.That was a fiasco.  The lady at the returns desk could not get the items off my credit card because it kept telling her that they were already returned.  All of us were dumbstruck.  So she said that she finally got them off and we went back home.  A week later I called to see if the charges were off my card and found that they weren't and was even charged for a missing payment.  I talked to the lady on the other end and she told me that she was going to make a report of it.  But my husband wantd it settled that day so we wnet back to Lowes to get it all straightened out.  That took about an hour and they even called their head office to get it straightened out.  The lady that was helping us could not understand why the store had it off their books, but it didn't come off my credit card.  She and the other person on the phone had talked for many minutes and finally they found the problem.  The store was using the wrong numbers on the items in question.  Finally my card has a zero balance again.  So I went and bought screws, nails and light bulbs and I forgo the Water Heater until we could get the electrician to come out and fix that problem.

From the time the water heater broke to the time that we could find an electrician it had been two weeks since we had hot water.  We braved ourselves and took cold showers and we heated water on the stove to wash dishes in.  Laundry didn't matter because I wash my clothes in cold water anyway.  The only good thing about all this is that it was still summer weather and a cold shower was welcoming.

After about a week of trying to find an electrician he finally came out and what he found was not good at all. He told us that the circuit breaker in the box was right but the wiring was wrong and that if we wanted a lower bill that we would have to clean up the crawlspace.  We always wanted to go down in the fine dust and dirt and fallen insulation to clean that all up.....NOT.  Well we did want to eventually, but right then.

Before we cleaned.  We stored stuff down there.
The insulation keeps falling because the
mountain keeps shifting.

It took us 2 days and 8 hours to clean it all up.  He came back out and what he found was a strange ay to do the electric wiring.  They did have the right wiring from the circuit breaker, but only to a junction box.  Let me tell you about that.  When we were putting in all the electric and the water heater there some 15 years ago, we wanted the water heater on the other side of the basement because it was closer to the sinks, dishwasher, toilet and shower.  The did not do as we told them to do and somehow it got put on the opposite side of the basement making it longer to heat the water.

Almost done cleaning.  We took the first set of shelves down
and will have them in another place, once this is all done.

BUT......the wiring was right and whoever (the
main contractor) decided to do the opposite and so someone must have put that junction box in and ran a lesser wire to the water heater.  The electrician at that time was working for our main contractor as a sub-contractor.  I fumed even more, but that saved us lots of money because this electrician had to only run the correct wire from the junction box to where we want the new water heater to go.

This is where we want the new Water Heater.

Now it has been another week and we still don't have a water heater.  We go back to Lowes to purchase a new one again, but now that we changed the placement of it they have to send out a plumber to get the dimensions and feasibility of it and what they would have to do to install it in it's rightful place...in the crawlspace near the sinks, dishwasher, toilet and shower.  Oh something else that I will have to ask the plumber too...why do we have to run the bathroom sink to get the shower to run....strange eh?  We a few years ago we had a whole house water softener put in that crawlspace and they had their own pressure valve on it.  The our neighbor was having many problems with his water coming in from the water company that the water company came an put another water pressure valve on our house.  I think this is the problem, that and they had told us that we used twice the amount of water in May and September and that we had the water leak, which we did not.  After 3 years of all this finally it was fixed.  Finally the neighbors got their water fixed too and all problems have stopped......except the pressure in our water to go out to the shower as it is the last one the line.

So the plumber told us that he would be here between 7 and 1 today.  I have a foreboding feeling that this is going to cost a lot of money....something that should have been done right in the first place 15 years ago.

5 weeks without a water heater.  It is getting really old and it has to be done before winter comes.

As much as my dad wanted to help us out with giving this house to us, it has become a money pit because of shady contractors and those who want to do shortcuts to help them and not the homeowners.  There is lots more to this house I now call "The Money Pit".

They guy from Lowes just came and left.  He took measurements and all that and is reporting to Lowes later today and Lowes will call us back in a few days.  This is ridiculous as to how long and how much trouble all this, rather simple project, has turned out to be.

What he told me was the Berkeley County has this new code that they have to have a expansion tank on top of the water heater.  I know that water expands when it is heated.  The older water heaters had a release valve on them for that purpose.  The plumber asked where that water was going to go.....well excuse me for being stupid but, that is why they have the drip pans and that is why you put a CPVC pipe from that release valve to the drip pan.  Just how many people currently, on the older water heaters, have such a thing as the expansion tank.....and how many of those old water heaters have exploded because of pressure when the fill up?  I would guess not many.  Our heater is 15 years old and never blew up or anything like that.. Their logic doesn't make any sense....at all.  Just more money.

See the release valve and the pipe going down the the pan.
We didn't get a drip pan, but that is where the extra water goes.

I will edit this as I get more information because we are in a holding pattern again.

UPDATE 9/30/2016
Got a call about that LOWES Water heater and said that it could only be a 38 gallon water heater. I said no problem. What a mess.! They are thinking that we are going to dig a hole to put the water heater is. He also said that the whole crawlspace need to be the same depth. What a joke! It can't be the same depth EVER! Our house is on a slope! He also said the whole side has to be the same depth, which it is where we are going to put it. We just need to widen the area about 6 inches, or maybe not because he said that the water heater is 24 inches wide. Well the area is 36 inches wide and is the whole length of the basement wall.. We are going to be buying the water heater and talking to them about it tomorrow evening.

Mystery solved and some good news and some bad news:

See The Door on the front of the huse on the left.
That corner under the lattice, that is no longer there, is
where the rain is coming under the crawlspace.

I was able to see where the flooding was coming from from this storm. Good News and Bad News though. We will still have to move the water heat, but not under the crawlspace. The water is running under the crawlspace from the front of the house where the water comes into the crawlspace and pooling right where we wanted the new water heater. There is a wide door that lifts up so that we can get to the water for the whole house. I have been leaving it open for the cats to go under there in the winter or when it rains. It is only running in on the one side where we also transplanted the Rose from and that has left an small hill with each rain. We are going to have to find a way to divert that small stream that the rain has left. We didn't have that prior to the snowmegaddon we had in January when we got 42 inches of snow in one day. The cats can still get in the other side, just not the side at the corner of the house. They will have to walk or run around the door to get into the other side.