The Water Heater Conundrum

I hate our water heater.  With a burning passion.  There are very few people I hate worse than this contraptions design.  I’ve never had a water heater need so much upkeep.  Hell, I’ve never seen any appliance in an entire house need so much upkeep....

Such is the price of home ownership though.  When things go wrong, you have to fix them, replace them, or pay someone way too much to deal with it.  Fact is, we’ve had several people look at the thing, and only one person understood the problem, but his ‘fix’ was a workaround that is a bit crazy.



The water heater is a gas model, which is nice because it heats up pretty quick, and uses a very small amount of resource to do so.  Maybe the water pressure in the house is too much though, the tank is huge, but it drains entirely too fast for its size....  But that’s another concern entirely.

The problem comes when the unit needs ‘cleaning.’  First off, dust gets up under the thing.  The hole to get up under it is so small I can’t even reach my hand into it, let along get anything under it to clean it.  Every time it goes out, my mind races, thinking of any form of crazy idea that would attach to a vacuum and bend up under that thing.

Second off rust falls down on top of the burner.  To clean that, you have to disassemble the entire burner assembly and remove it.  I don’t like dealing with gas.  Things can go wrong very quickly if they go wrong.  And it can be extremely deadly in more ways than just fire.  There are many things wrong with removing the burner to clean it.

The pipes and tubes that deliver the gas are extremely fragile.  I worry every time I touch the thing about bending one in the wrong way and breaking it.  The process itself takes several minutes to disassemble.  And when it comes to reassembly, you have to get down on your stomach, with a flashlight, looking through a very small hole to see if its all aligned properly.  The area you have to work in is tiny enough without having to press your face against the floor....

In the end, if I only had to do it once, I’d be perfectly okay with it.  Problem is, this process has to be done about every 3 to 4 months.  And what’s worse is, every time I do it, I have to repeat the process 3 or 4 times to get it right.  I want to scream every single time and start shooting people.

I write this in the moment between having just taken it all apart and putting it back together only to have it not work.  So I’m going to have to go do it again.  As I write this, I’m browsing through Amazon, dreaming of the day I can get another water heater that will actually work.  Dreams....  They don’t help me right now, and we need hot water.  So yeah, time to finish this and get to work.

Yeah, the joys of home ownership....  Wouldn’t trade it for the world though.  There’s still enough good around the house to make it well worth this all being ours.