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Tag Archives: water heaters

Roadrunner Update: Week 4

Water in the drain pan of the water heater.

The water heater didn’t survive cycling the water pressure. Looks like a new one is in order.

Ruben and crew made good progress on the Roadrunner house since last week. As with almost every project I’ve ever worked on, we’re falling behind schedule. But that’s because we keep spending “invisible money” to make things right. And we found more places to spend it.

More often than not, turning off the water to a house exposes a problem with the water heater. While it is in use, water pressure keeps any rust in the tank pressed tightly against the tank walls. When the pressure is eliminated, the rust can settle to the bottom of the tank, exposing small holes in the tank wall. These holes leak when you turn the water back on.

This problem happens often enough that we budget for it in every renovation. If the tank survives cycling the water pressure, that money goes into the contingency budget and often fixes other problems, and the water heater is usually good for years. When it doesn’t survive, we replace the water heater, and our budget isn’t killed with an unplanned expense.

A man sprays texture.

Grillo sprays texture on the walls. When he’s done, the texture throughout the house will be consistent and beautiful. He always does a good job.

Last week I mentioned we had five different textures on the drywall. When skim coating and floating, we discovered that some of the drywall had not been installed correctly, and that caused undulations to telegraph through the skim coat. We removed that, fixed the underlying problems, and reinstalled new drywall—all so we could re-texture it and continue working.

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Water Heaters

A water heater sitting in an aluminum pan on a raised platform.

This new platform brings the Roadrunner water heater to code. You can see the original platform in the foreground. The new flooring will be laid around the installation.

George Carlin used to joke, “Why do they call it a ‘hot water heater’? Hot water doesn’t need to be heated.”

These days, every house has at least one water heater. Some are in the attic, some in the garage, and some in the laundry area. I’ve even seen a few installed outside.

The water damage to the kitchen wall, which I discussed last time, was caused by a faulty drain line that dated to a time when the water heater at Roadrunner was installed in the attic. It was moved to the laundry room when additions were made to the house, and the leaky drain line was ancient history by the time we bought the house. We just had to fix the hidden damage.

The other thing we had to fix was the way the water heater was installed in the laundry room. To conform to current building codes, water heaters must:

  • Be installed a minimum distance above the floor to encourage drainage—water runs downhill, after all
  • Sit in an aluminium pan to help prevent interior flooding
  • Drain to the exterior of the house—again to prevent interior flooding

But if the water is inside the heater, where does the flooding come from?

All water heaters have a pressure relief valve to help prevent them from exploding. The valve dumps water out of the tank if the pressure gets too high. Without proper installation, it dumps that hot water onto the floor. And as Paul Simon sang, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”

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