Replaced My Water Heater

Yesterday, my father-in-law and I spent 12½ hours replacing my water heater.

Our water heater was old. My house’s previous owners did not report changing the water heater on their house condition form. Given their move in date and the apparent date code on the water heater, it was at least 14 years old.

It was showing its age. It couldn’t keep up with a 10 minute shower using a 2.5 gallon per minute shower head. I figure that the dip tube may have gone out or the heat transfer was exceptionally poor.

Fortunately this old heater had not leaked yet.

Here is that old piece of garbage:

In a recent article, Consumer Reports cut open several water heaters and found that, in general, the longer the warranty term, the higher quality the water heater. For gas heaters, a longer warranty means “bigger burners and better heat transfer for faster water heating, along with more anode material and thicker insulation.” The width of our old heater suggests that it may have just been a 6 or 9 year warranty version, so it was probably on borrowed time before we moved in.

Not only is this heater “old and busted,” whoever installed it was a complete moron. Look carefully at the hot water connection:

This is where the installer sweat soldered a ¾” pipe into a ¾” female threaded adapter. The excess solder sitting around the place makes it look like the soldering happened after the adapter was screwed in. The same thing happened on the cold water line. If this is the case, then the nipples that this female copper piece screws into also got extremely hot. What’s on the other side of the nipple on the cold water inlet? The plastic dip tube. What happens to plastic dip tubes when they get extremely lot? Premature failure. So this water heater could have been “damaged goods” for years.

Back to the story.

On Friday night we pre-purchased a 40 gallon 9 year warranty Whirlpool natural gas water heater from my nearest Lowe’s. Lowe’s did not sell a 12 year warranty 40 gallon natural gas water heater.

Side note: of all the water heaters Consumer Reports tested, the only oddity it found was with the Whirlpool 40 gallon ones. CR reported that the 40 gallon 9 and 12 year water heaters’ internal stuff was identical, suggesting you don’t get a better heater by buying the Whirlpool 12 year unit.

On Saturday morning I stopped by a Home Depot and found that an equivalent water heater is $40 cheaper. Lowe’s refused to price match—even though the product was equivalent, it wasn’t the same brand—so I canceled my Lowe’s order. In the end I got a 12 year warranty 40 gallon GE water heater for only $21 more than Lowe’s 9 year version.

I feel better about the GE water heater anyway. Unlike Whirlpool, GE actually mentions water heaters on its site, suggesting they want to be associated with their product. The GE may really be a Rheem unit, the same brand that I have right now.

Getting the water heater was a fiasco. My father-in-law and I had to go to two Home Depots before we found the one I needed. Then when we got there, we spent about an hour figuring out the right parts to hook up a drain line to my drain pan. More on that later.

Here I am wheeling the new heater into the house:

It’s “ Superior ”. Oooh, aaah.

Next we drained the old heater:

This was way fun. I drained this water heater over a year ago without a problem. This time the heater would not drain even though I had hot water valves open in the adjacent bathroom. If I opened the water heater’s cold water inlet valve, the pressure would force water through the hose just fine. But when I shut off the cold water valve, it quit flowing. I even drained the entire house water system and reopened the cold water inlet. That didn’t work. I finally messed with the temperature and pressure (T&P) release valve. It came apart, allowing air to enter the tank and defeating the vacuum. Eureka ! 10 minutes later and I have an empty water heater.

It turns out that there may have been a check ball in the hot water nipple. That would prevent hot water from back-flowing into the heater.

Here’s the T&P valve ripped apart with its guts off to the left:

Next we cut the copper lines on top and disconnected the gas line:

The water heater wheeled out effortlessly with a dolly. Here’s the aftermath:

That’s the T&P drain line to the right. The chimney was taken down and put to the left.

The floor was a mess!

All that gray stuff is dust. Knowing I wouldn’t have access to this area again, I thoroughly vacuumed the floor and wall.

Next I cut off the 90° bend from the hot water line and the valve from the cold water line:

Then I prepped these lines with some fine sandpaper and flux and sweat soldered ¾” copper to male adapters:

Look carefully and you can see where capillary action pulled the solder through the fitting. They show up as those bright spots on the seam where the supply pipe bottoms out in the fitting.

Even though I only had a propane torch, the sweat soldering went fine. It just took a little while to heat up the pipe.

Here are some more views of the sweat solders:

This is the bottom of one of the fittings.

This is the bottom of the other fitting. You can barely make out where my sanding ended and where solder pooled up.

The pipes just goes to a 90 degree fitting and then drops down through the wall to connect to other pipes in the crawl space. It’s not secured very well.

Whoever re-plumbed the house 20 or so years ago did a mediocre job on the plumbing. That’s why I had such a fun time with my shower a few weeks ago.

This may not have been apparent in the earlier picture, but the flooring under the heater was warped. I think that the pre-1991 water heater back could have had a huge water leak. Fortunately we had extra 12×1 lumber in the garage, apparently an old closet shelf. After a few measurements and cuts with a circular saw, we have a makeshift, semi-level floor:

A reasonably level floor was important. These days you need to put a pan below your water heater. That’s a smart thing: if the heater has a small leak, you have something to contain and carry away the water instead of damaging your house. The pan is made out of aluminum, and the water heater’s weight may have bent the pan pretty badly had I put it directly on the warped floor.

Next we threw a new valve on the gas line:

Remember the T&P relief valve line? That line is ¾” copper that runs to the outside. I wanted to use that line for the pan drain, with the T&P valve of the new heater just draining into the pan. (This is apparently standard now.) The drain pan came with a 1” male PCV adapter like this: 1" Male Adapter SCH-40It also included a large rubber washer and large metal nut. The drain pan has a cutout that the threaded end of this PCV part fits through, and the rubber washer and nut tighten against the cutout to make a water-tight connection.

As mentioned earlier, my father-in-law and I spent about an hour at the Home Depot scratching our heads trying to figure out how to connect the drain pan to this ¾” copper line. It wasn’t easy because we had to go from PCV to copper and also do a sudden 90 degree turn into this line, and it all had to be done in a very short distance. The best that Home Depot staff could recommend was some kind of compression fitting that they didn’t carry. Eventually we stumbled across this solution, which worked very well:

What you see is, from bottom to top, is the stub of the T&P valve drain line (I cut it off about 2” above the floor), a 90° street ¾” copper fitting, and a 1” female threaded to ¾” female sweat copper reducer. We also found a piece that’s like the PCV adapter pictured above but without the long, smooth part to the left of the threads. This helped us with water heater clearance. Here’s a picture of the final assembly:

I thought we would pretty things up a bit and cover holes on the wall with flanges:

This can prevent bugs from getting inside.

Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures for the next few scenes. We put the drain pan in place and then got the water heater situated. Manhandling the water heater into the closet was an adventure. The closet opening was only 2” wider than the water heater, and we had to lift the unit up high enough to clear the pan. Fortunately the water heater was shipped on a cardboard base that was approximately the same height as the drain pan. We slid the heater on the base up to the drain pan and carefully rocked and rotated it up and over into the pan. It took about 15 minutes for us to figure this out and do it. Once the heater was in the pan, further positioning was easy.

Given how difficult that was, I am very glad we chose against a 50 gallon water heater. We almost thought about doing it. The 50 gallon unit was only ¼” narrower than the closet and taller.

Here’s a later picture with the heater hooked up to the water lines:

I put 600 PSI forged brass ball valves on top of the dielectric nipples. Then I used male-to-male couplers to hook up those flexible copper lines that run from the house plumbing to the water heater. Man, those flexible lines make me nervous. Instinctually, flexible stuff shouldn’t be on a critical part of the house’s plumbing!

Notice a problem with the above picture? Hint: where’s the chimney gonna go?

Oh, no! The hot water line blocks the chimney! If that’s not bad enough, we also discovered that the new water heater’s chimney is not in the same position as the old heater’s chimney. Another Home Depot trip!

An hour and a half later, I cut the hot water pipe back and installed a new male threaded fitting:

This clears the chimney great. That’s a wet rag below the pipe. It insulates the heater from my torch and catches solder.

The new chimney fits perfectly:

We made sure the new chimney is the same ultimate height as the old one. The old chimney was a 5’ piece and a 3’ piece. The new chimney is two 3’ sections and two 1’ flexible sections. The old water heater was 3½” shorter than the new one, but the bends in those two 1’ flexible sections took out about 2”, so it was close enough.

I also installed a long copper pipe from the T&P relief valve to the drain pan:

Take a closer look at the gas valve on the above picture. Notice how close it is to the heater? The flexible gas hose won’t fit. So when we went back to Home Depot, we got a 90 degree black steel ½” elbow. Now the valve mostly faces up:

We cranked the black steel pretty tight and used plenty of pipe dope.

Everything’s ready for action!

We thought we were done, but we found several small leaks in the brass fittings. I cranked down those fittings tighter than I thought brass should be cranked. With a 12” adjustable wrench, I was really pulling hard at one point. But they still leaked. A quick call to a contractor in Oregon (a member of my Nova listserv) cleared it up. I wrapped one layer of Teflon tape around all the fittings, but he says I should have used 3-4 layers. All my life I had just wrapped one layer of Teflon around fittings. Until now the only Teflon I had really ever used was for fittings on my old Chevrolet Nova’s cooling system, which at most had 16 PSI of pressure. Municipal water pressure is a few multiples of that.

I took all the fittings off, re-taped them with 4 layers of Teflon, and put the system back together. I ended up with one very slow leak, and I corrected that leak with a little more tightening. Here are the fittings after the re-Tefloning:

Next we turned on the gas and leak tested with our noses and with soapy water. We found no leaks.

Next I lit the heater. I had to hold down the red pilot button for a while to let gas flow through the line. The pilot lit perfectly. Here is a picture of the flames taken through the peep hole:

The red hot part is probably the ceramic part around the igniter. I kept the camera’s shutter open for 0.6 seconds to get this.

After we got it lit and let the burner fire up, we heard tapping sounds and noticed an orangish flame. The manual explained it: cold water entering the heater caused condensation. The orange flame and tapping was from water drops falling onto the burner. The tapping stopped within 10 minutes.

This water heater’s dielectric nipples seem cheap:

Inside this is a little rubber flap and no moving parts. Contrast this to my previous heater which completely blocked back-flowing; its nipples may have had a check ball. Already I can feel that the cold water inlet line gets hot as the hot water naturally migrates out. Hopefully this won’t cause too much heat loss.

Other than that issue, I am satisfied with the new water heater. I didn’t have to repeatedly adjust the faucets during today’s shower. It also runs a lot quieter than the previous one. Hopefully this new unit will cut down on our gas bills.

I am pleased to report that I am typing this blog entry a full trouble-free day after the installation.

I am not sure whether I need to correct this later, but the heater leans just slightly:

This picture exaggerates the lean. I will probably correct this with some wood or plastic shims.

One final point: note carefully my wording. Not once did I type “hot water heater.” Water heaters heat cold water, not hot water. It would be technically correct to say “cold water heater,” but I just say “water heater.”

UPDATE: We spent $513.12 on this whole heater replacement. That is more than $300 less than a quoted replacement price, and we got a much better water heater out of the deal.

The Social Security Trust Fund is a myth and a hoax

IMPORTANT NOTE: This article is not anti-Social Security. It criticizes how the American left has led us to magical thinking about Social Security, that worthless IOUs are in fact a huge, redeemable asset that keeps Social Security solvent for many decades.

The Social Security “Trust Fund” is among the biggest lies of American liberals. It is just a fancy accounting trick, a la Enron and WorldCom.

Consider this analogy:

Sam sets aside money for a future expense, suppose for replacing his house’s A/C. Sam knows it only has a year left, and he needs $2400 to replace it.

Sam save $200 per month. He puts it in the piggy bank on his dresser. At the same time, he “borrows” this monthly $200 so that he can live more lavishly: eat out more, buy more clothes, etc. He replaces this $200 with an IOU.

The 12 months passed. As predicted, Sam’s A/C conks out. Sam needs that saved $2400 to repair his A/C. He opens his piggy bank and finds 12 $200 IOUs. The A/C repairman only accepts dollars, not IOUs. Sam can’t magically produce this $2400, so he has to take out debt to pay the repairman.

Woah, what happene?

If you look at Sam’s savings and borrowings as separate activities, then yes, we can legalistically say Sam “saved” $2400. But only an idiot would look at it that way. Sam is one entity. The only way Sam can save money is if more cash comes in than goes out. That didn’t happen: Sam spent that $200 “savings” as soon as he got it.

What would happen if I replaced “Sam” with “Uncle Sam”?

Uncle Sam sets aside money for a future expense, say for a date about 13 years away when its senior retirement system starts paying out more than it brings in. Uncle Sam sets aside billions per month towards this expense, and he puts it in the piggy bank on his dresser. At the same time, Uncle Sam “borrows” every last penny of these monthly billions so that he can live more lavishly.

Suppose the 13 years have passed, and, as predicted, Uncle Sam needs to pay out more senior retirement money than he takes in? Uncle Sam needs to tap those billions he saved.

Uncle Sam opens his piggy bank and only finds 156 IOUs. Seniors need dollars, not IOUs! Uncle Sam can’t produce these billions of dollars magically, so he has to take out billions and billions of additional debt each year to pay the seniors. (Or he can stiflingly raise taxes or drastically reduce spending or devalue the currency.)

That piggy bank is the mythical “Social Security Trust Fund.” Sam’s piggy bank and Uncle Sam’s “trust fund” are both full of worthless IOUs.

Instead of “IOU,” I could have written “federal bond.” The concept is the same. When you owe money to yourself, it’s an IOU. If the federal government buys its own bond, that is also an IOU. You can’t enforce debt you owe to yourself, so an IOU is just an accounting trick.

How does the government “invest” in its own bonds?

A payroll tax finances the Social Security system. Right now this tax pulls in more than the system doles out in retirement benefits, leaving a surplus. Social Security technically “invests” its surplus into US bonds.

Who issues US bonds? What is the Social Security part of? The answer to both questions is “the federal government.” So the federal government is buying bonds from itself!

You can’t owe money to yourself. Again, that is an accounting trick. A more realistic way of looking at the big picture is that Social Security surpluses are diverted to Congress to pay a chunk of our $2 trillion annual federal budget. Congress has become dependent on this chunk to maintain current spending levels. (See http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/08/28/budget/)

US federal government indebtedness is in two major parts: the “accounting trick” IOU debt and externally held debt, which is are bonds owned by private individuals, foreign governments, corporations, state and local governments, pensions, and mutual funds.

When it comes down to it, the externally held debt is all that matters. A single bill of Congress can legally wipe away all internal debts; again, remember that internally held debt is just IOUs, paper tricks, accounting shams.

A recently published figure is that all US indebtedness is over $7,300,000,000,000 (source). Of that, about $3,800,000,000,000 (52%) is internal debt, the IOUs. The true United States indebtedness, i.e., debt held by external entities, is “only” $3,600,000,000,000.

What is going to happen between now and 2018? Social Security’s payout will gradually increase to where it is 100% of payroll tax revenue. As this happens, Social Security can transfer less and less money to Congress, so we will increasingly see one or more of more taxes, less spending elsewhere, more debt, or devaluing the dollar (printing more money).

When 2018 finally hits, when Social Security transfers $0 to Congress, it just gets worse. Plain and simple, there is no simple fix.

Irresponsible American liberals treat the Social Security system as a separable, independent unit of the US government. They wrap that with complex theories about “contracts” and “generational entitlement” and so on.

No matter how many words apologists throw at that logic, they still cannot escape that the IOUs are worthless.

We’ve got to stop magical thinking. The federal government and all its programs wrap up into one entity. It has various forms of income: income taxes, payroll taxes, tariffs, fines, etc. And it has various forms of spending: military, welfare, Social Security, etc. We will never solve Social Security’s problems until leaders start taking such a holistic view.

Master bathroom shower adventure

A few days ago, I had this bright idea that I would replace the shower arm and flange in my master shower. My master shower is really small, and its shower arm is a whopping 9” long.

I tried to unscrew the shower arm, but it wouldn’t budge. After a lot of straining, I finally got some movement, and then I got that sickening feeling of “something turning not for the right reason.”

It turns out that I separated the 90° piece from the copper pipe! In the process of getting the arm out, I also broke some tile. (I stupidly believed that if I yanked hard enough, the surrounding tile would neatly come off. NOT!)

The enlarged opening, with a mangled copper pipe behind it:

The 90° piece that’s not supposed to come off:

This is not even the correct piece for showers. The correct piece would have bolted up to a piece of wood on the back, making it impossible for it to have twisted the supply line like this.

This is bad. Now I have to take apart some of the shower wall.

Fast forward to today.

I start out with a hole in my shower wall:

I used a Dremel with a cut off wheel to remove the grout between that tile and the adjacent tiles. Here’s the Dremel with the cut off wheel installed:

This was just the standard, fiberglass-reinforced metal cutting wheel.

I went through 1½ of those wheels to remove the grout. Here’s a detail shot:

(I love 5 megapixels! This shot was taken at a distance.)

I tried cutting through the drywall behind the tile with a hacksaw blade. I couldn’t get good leverage or speed, so it was plodding slowly and sloppily. A trip to Home Depot and a compact hacksaw purchase saved me:

With this thing I just sailed through the drywall.

Hallelujah, the tile and drywall are out, and better yet there is drywall behind the drywall! I have a surface to glue my drywall square to when I am done. Take note of the mangled pipe:

Here’s the drywall/tile square:

A few minutes later I hacksawed the mangled piece off the end of the supply line:

Here it is:

Uh, oh, notice the not rounded shape? Argh!

I spent the next several minutes coaxing the supply line to a rounded shape so that I could fit a coupling over it. After massaging with some channel lock pliers and a Dremel bit and hammering the coupling on with the pliers, I finally got the coupling over the supply line.

Notice in a previous picture how there is a large wood piece behind the supply line? I measured that there is a ¾” gap between this wood piece and the supply line. Luckily, I had ¾” thick wood in the garage. A few minutes later and this is what I ended up with:

The two wood screws on the top were only about 1” long. That’s all I had. That left a scant ¼” of screw length to bite into that other wood piece, so I had to countersink their holes just over ¼”. That way these wood screws could bit and secure themselves in the backing wood.

Before I went too much further, I placed the tile back into position and put a copper pipe through to line up where the piping needs to end up:

This let me put some crosshatches where things should end up:

You’re looking through the tile to that wood piece I bolted on.

A few minutes later I sweat soldered the coupler to the supply line:

Notice the burn marks? I aimed a propane torch at the pipe while soldering. The fire wandered a bit.

Before making the final solder, I need to test fit everything:

I somehow managed to make the pipe end up just a hair to the right of where it used to be. In the end it still worked out OK. See the washers behind the supply line? In the process of mangling the supply line and forcing the coupler on, I bent the line a hair so that it was slightly angled away from me. I used the washers to force the line to face parallel to the wall so that I could slip the 90 degree fitting in.

By the way, I had already soldered a short length of copper pipe to the 90 degree fitting that the shower arm is screwed into.

Now I sweat solder the last joint, the top of the coupler:

The wood is even more scorched! The top left side burned on its own at one point. I was able to just blow it out.

Now it’s time for a leak test:

Passed with flying colors! (The only thing that leaked was the pipe plug itself. I didn’t screw it in tightly enough.) Oh, yeah, notice that the 90 degree fitting is now screwed into the wood piece.

Liquid Nails will hold the tile/drywall square once I put it back on:

Yay!

Fixing the broken tiles with latex caulk:

It’s not a perfect cosmetic fix, but it will keep the area dry at least.

Doesn’t look that bad:

My very messy grout job:

Here’s the whole thing all cleaned up with a new showerhead:

Yay!

I was going to replace the shower arm in the hallway bath, but I changed my mind. That shower arm is not secured to anything, so I would probably be stuck with the same situation if I mess with it.

How to make money on eBay

Here is what I do to make the most money for my items on eBay:

  • Use the 10 day auction. For only $0.20 more, it’s worth it to give buyers a few more days to bid on your auction.
  • Start the auction at $0.01. Starting low means you’ll get more bids as initial bidders nickel and dime the auction up to a reasonable starting amount. An auction with more bids appears exciting and attracts more visits. Do not worry about the final price: if your item is really worth anything, and you described it well, it will garner a fair price by auction close. Only use a higher starting price if your item is truly one of a kind, prospective buyers are rare, and final selling prices on prior auctions are inconsistent. (Chances are exceedingly high that nothing sold by a reader of this blog is “one of a kind.”) A preferable alternative to a high starting price is a reserve price. What this means is that if the final auction value does not meet or exceed the reserve price, the auction is not binding.
  • Only charge actual shipping costs. Sellers who pad shipping expenses are dishonest. Furthermore, buyers will gravitate towards sellers who have cheap shipping. (If you don’t believe that, consider that Amazon.com does not charge shipping on orders above $25. What effect does that have on their sales?) Charge only what it costs to ship the item, and do not charge any “handling” costs unless this item’s shipping procedure is unusual. Provide shipping materials gratis. (This requires prior planning on your part: grab discarded boxes from work, save packing materials, buy when the are on sale, etc.) eBay has a handy feature where if you provide the dimensions and weight of the item beforehand, buyers can see the exact cost to ship the item to their door. This leads me to…
  • Package the item beforehand. First, this gives you an opportunity to weigh the item. That way you can really know what it will cost to mail the item. Packaging adds weight; I’ve lost money on more than one auction when I failed to consider this. Second, what happens if you sell the item, receive payment, need to ship it the next day, but have no packaging? You have to make an expensive trip to the local office supply place and purchase packaging at full retail. What a great way to eliminate your profits! Had you prepared in advance, you may have been able to acquire boxes and packaging for free or cheap.
  • Give a detailed, concise, and straightforward description. List all technical details about the item, accurately describe its condition, and be honest and open about defects. Do not use lots of fonts, colors, graphics, or other distracting junk. Keep the auction plain and readable. Your item will sell itself if you described it accurately.
  • Do not be a used car salesman. Do not pad your description with chintzy text, graphics, or other crap. For example, “one of a kind,” “extra special,” “can’t miss,” etc. Give me a break. Do you want to make yourself look like a used car salesman?
  • Lots and lots of good pictures. Include many detailed photos. Give close-ups of problem spots and good spots. Do not use fuzzy shots or ambiguous shots (for example, poor lighting that prevents the user from seeing the item properly). I can’t tell you how many car listings I have seen that probably would have gotten higher final auction values if the photos weren’t horrible. If you screwed up the shot, 1. get off your lazy ass and retake it, and 2. learn how not to make the same mistake in the future.
  • Have a good feedback rating. I recommend a rating of at least 15 positives with no neutrals or negatives. Otherwise you will have a puny track record. Sellers with minimal, zero, or negative feedback often get horrible final auction values. You may need to make some purchases to get positive feedback.
  • Be honest, be honest, be honest. Dishonesty will hurt your feedback rating, and long-term it will just cause more headaches than it’s worth. Don’t be like eDrop of Wichita  (additional link).
  • Use PayPal. PayPal has steep fees, but it’s much easier for buyers to pay you if you use PayPal. Look at it this way: if you didn’t use PayPal and eBay, would you have been able to sell the item in the first place? And if you were able to sell the item (probably at a garage sale), would you have gotten this much?

With these tactics, I have had many surprisingly lucrative auctions. I’ve sold a broken Holley carburetor for $150 (the problem was accurately described), a Testors model for $80, and two new PDAs at a slight profit.