How Laziness Cost Me Over $800

We moved into our first house 7 years ago and I just learned a very important lesson. Let me start at the beginning. We looked at a lot of houses but wanted to find something that wasn’t going to need a lot of maintenance because I’m not very handy with tools or anything around the house. I can mow the yard and trim the bushes, but beyond those basics I am pretty clueless as to what I should or need to do around the house. Now that you know about my ineptitude with all things house hold I’ll get to my sad story of money loss.

About three weeks ago I was taking a shower and there wasn’t very much hot water. This didn’t really surprise me because often when no one uses the hot water for a while the water in the tank cools down and can take a little while to actually get it hot again. The very next day my wife told me that she also had a cold shower, so I went into the basement and I could hear the gas burning under the water heater and it was hot so I figured that no one had used the water for a while. So in my infinite wisdom, I devised a plan to help put an end to this problem.

The next Saturday I headed out to the hardware store to buy some pipe insulation. I figured that the pipes were letting all of the heat out since they were just exposed in the basement and it gets pretty cold down there. After a lot of hard work I had wrapped the insulation around all of the exposed hot water pipes in the basement. I was sure that I had solved my hot water issues. Well not really.

On Sunday I got up a little early before Church to take a nice long hot shower to try and work the cricks out of my back that I had gotten the day before putting in all of that pipe insulation. To my surprise there was NO hot water. I mean we only had ice water. I ran to the basement to check out the work that I had done the day before only to be met with a puddle of water. Well not really a puddle, more like a lake. There was the water heater, water freely flowing from its bottom edge. I quickly turned off the water and called a plumber. They would be out the next day forcing my wife and I to endure cold showers.

It didn’t take long for the plumber to replace the hot water heater, but he did tell me one thing I will never forget. He said that he sees this type of problem a lot and that it is caused by not rinsing out your water heater. He said that our hard water leaves deposits inside that eventually harden and expand until the thing breaks. He also said that it makes it a lot harder for it to heat the water. Because I was too lazy to learn how to flush water heater sediment, I had to spend $800 to get a new water heater. I know how to get the job done. It actually is pretty easy, even for a noob like me.