It’s never just the one thing

When we first moved to our first home, one of the first things we did was to prepare the list of things we needed to take of…first.

It was a long list.  This is an old house, and the previous owner hadn’t done much to update it.

Everything started as a number one priority…and then we saw estimates and bills.  We reprioritized.

Today we finally got around to replacing our water heater.  Out went a huge12 – 14 year old 50 gallon water heater.  In came a sleek, new tiny tankless water system from Rinnai.

I’d been hearing about and researching these systems for over 4 years now.  They had hit the big time in the Southern states before we left.  You could hardly spend a weekend without hearing some home fixit radio show espousing the benefits of a tankless water system.  The systems were not as popular up here in Janesville when we arrived in 2007, largely due to a misconception that you had to install the system on the exterior of your home.

But little by little they seemed to catch on.

By 2008 I had bumped up the priority of the water heater.  We’d had a plumber or two out the house and gotten some basic information on our existing system.  The tank was probably 12 – 14 years old, well within that nebulous span of time when a traditional water heater might fail.  I had one sales person for a traditional system claim that with proper maintenance a tanked system could last for 20 years, just as long a tankless.  But we had no real way of knowing how well the previous owners maintained the heater in the years prior to the sale of the house.  I had no real desire to try to make a deal with a plumber for a new water heater after the old one failed.  Better to be safe than soggy, I always say.

Budgets being what they were, we gambled a little bit and held off for a year or so.  Every few months I’d call in to the installer I’d selected and ask a few questions here and a few questions there.  Then, about a month ago, we committed and scheduled the installation.

All in all, the installation went pretty smoothly.  The tankless system is sitting there on our wall in the basement, waiting for our need for hot water.

There was one small and potentially expensive hiccup, however.  During the installation, they of course had to shut off the water to the house.  After they finished, they of course turned it back on.  That’s when I discovered how much fun it can be to have galvanized steel pipes in your house.

For those of you unfamiliar with galvanized steel pipes, it was a pretty popular piping choice in its heyday, though I believe that a form of pvc piping is currently the reigning champ (especially with the price of copper).  There’s nothing overwhelmingly wrong with it as a medium.  It’s major issue is that it wears out over time.  And it wears out by rusting and flaking, from the inside out.

When you turn the water off to the pipes and then suddenly turn it back on, the sudden new flow of water runs through the pipes and strips off any loose rust flakes that have built up over the years.   These flakes, in turn, follow the water and attempt to run out whatever faucet happens to be turned on.  In doing so, there’s a potential to seriously gum up your faucets.

And that of course is what happened to our kitchen sink.  The water flow, which had always been terrible, is now just plain awful.   Hot or cold water trickles out at a snails pace.  It’s possible to clean it out, if you can disassemble the whole structure, but the type of faucet we have lends itself to getting permanently gummed up.  The installer for the Rinnai told me that he’d actually seen this behavior at another install he had done a while back (this one strictly a tank-to-tank replacement).  The faucet had gotten so backed up that they couldn’t event blow air into dislodge the rust flakes.

When my wife heard that story as well as our current situation, she responded with “I always wanted to replace that faucet anyway”.

And this is why you allocate an extra 10% or more for cost overruns during home improvement projects.