Hot Water Heater

March 5th, 2008 by Potato

Phase two of our hot water heater install was finished yesterday. That consisted of putting in a new exhaust duct made out of a plastic tubing that “won’t melt”. Respecting the building codes is always a good thing, or so the teevee tells me. The new water heater has had two problems. The first is that it smells like gas when it runs; I think that has been fixed by the new, better fitting vent (the guy attached the old one at a weird angle, perhaps doing a sloppy job since he knew it would be replaced in a week), though I don’t know how much of the odorous chemical in natural gas is supposed to survive the fire part and get into the exhaust. The other problem is that there is a very deep thrum when it runs. It makes the whole house vibrate a bit, and always makes me think that there’s some giant truck idling outside my window (for the apartment used to do something similar, though to a lesser degree, when exactly such a thing happened). I mentioned it to the guy doing the replacement, and I don’t think he really noticed it, because after looking to listen for a while he said “that’s normal for a superflue” — except that our old one was a virtually identical superflue water heater, and it definitely didn’t shake the house when it ran.

The basement has a pretty hefty crop of mold coming up now after the flood from the last tank going kaput. The usual corner of the laundry room was a little fuzzy, but Wayfare seemed to do a good job of cleaning that one out, there was only a little residual fuzz there. However, where the floor is rough, unfinished concrete and hard to bleach a whole culture has developed, mostly under the washing machine and the water heater. I’ve doused the areas with the last of our very expensive bottle of mold inhibitor (Wayfare thinks we ought to send the bills for it to our landlord), so hopefully that will keep it at bay.

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