At 6:10 last Wednesday morning I carried a basket of laundry down the basement stairs and stepped into water that had no business being there. A thin sheet of it ran from the base of the water heater across the painted floor toward the drain. My first thought was the dehumidifier hose, which also runs to that drain. It wasn't the hose.
The water was coming from under the jacket at the bottom of the tank, with a rust-colored streak down one side. Our water heater was a 2009 40-gallon gas unit, and the energy assessor had flagged it as aging back in September. A leaking tank isn't something you fix. It's something you replace, and the only question is how fast.
The first twenty minutes
I closed the cold water valve on top of the tank and turned the gas control knob to off, both of which I'd looked up in the manual months ago, just in case. Then I got the shop vac out for the puddle. Moose, who is afraid of the shop vac, supervised from the top of the stairs with his ears flat.
At 6:30 I texted Gary, because Gary is always up. He came over in slippers and a jacket, looked at the tank for about five seconds and told me to call his plumber, the same one who quoted $1,150 in June for our kitchen PEX run, back when Gary and I decided to do that job ourselves.
Tessa came down, took in the scene and said, "So the house got you a birthday present." I'd turned 30 four days earlier.
Three quotes in two days
By lunch on Wednesday I had three options:
- Gary's plumber: $1,780 for a 40-gallon Bradford White with the same atmospheric vent into the chimney, including the permit, an expansion tank, a new gas flex line and hauling the old one away. He could do Friday morning.
- A big-box store install: $1,640, but the earliest install date was four days out, with no hot water in between.
- A large regional company: $2,350, available Thursday.
We picked the plumber. The big-box option was $140 cheaper, but that bought us four more days of cold showers. The large company was $570 more for one day sooner. And Friday is the day I work from home, so I'd be there for the whole install without burning a vacation day.
I never seriously thought about doing this one myself. I'll cut and crimp PEX, but a water heater means a gas connection, a permit and a vent that has to draft correctly into a chimney the furnace also uses. Getting any of those wrong isn't a leak. It's carbon monoxide. That's where my line is, and I'm comfortable with it.
Wednesday night we heated water in the kettle for the dishes. Thursday after work we drove to my parents' house in Jenison to shower, and my mom made sloppy joes like we were in high school.
Friday the plumber showed up at 8, had the old tank drained and out by 9:30, and had hot water running by 12:30. He checked the draft at the vent with the burner running and showed me the new expansion tank, which he said is required now on a system like ours. That night I tested both CO detectors anyway.
Where the money came from
This is exactly what our house fund is for. We've put $150 a month into it since May, and there was about $1,050 in it on Wednesday morning. So $1,050 came from the house fund and the other $730 came from our emergency fund. It's the first time the house fund ran dry. In planner terms, the safety stock did its job and then some.
The emergency fund part matters more than it looks. When we switched insurers in July, we took a $2,500 deductible to lower the premium, and the deal we made with ourselves was that the emergency fund never sits below $2,500 while we carry it. So topping that $730 back up comes first, ahead of anything fun, over the next few months.
Would the warranty we skipped have helped?
Back in May I wrote about letting the seller-paid home warranty lapse instead of renewing at $612 a year plus $100 per service call. Of course I thought about it on Wednesday.
The honest answer is: possibly some of it. I still had the sample contract saved, so I read it again. A failed water heater was a covered item. But there were payout caps, and the contract excluded or limited code-required upgrades and things like permits and haul-away, which is a good part of what we paid for. If we'd renewed, we would have paid about $357 in premiums by now (seven months at $51) plus the $100 service fee, and we'd have waited for whichever contractor they sent. I don't know what a claim would actually have paid out, and I'm not going to pretend I do. If you have a plan, your contract is the only thing that can answer this.
The old tank sat in the driveway for an hour before the helper wheeled it to the truck. I logged its retirement in the house sheet, where I've tracked appliance ages since May. The next oldest line on that list is the furnace, born 1998.
