Roughing it

2010 is a headache and this is only Day 2. It started off fine until yesterday, late morning, when I made the fatal mistake of going downstairs to do a bit of laundry and noticed the small river running out of the water heater and, thankfully, down to the drain in the floor that is about 2 feet away. Of course this had to happen on a holiday.

We had a similar problem in October but the plumber said that it was due to rain coming in around the roof vent so one fine fall Saturday morning, Big A and Neighbor Dan climbed the roof and had some male bonding time that involved spreading a tar-like substance around the vent and repainting it a lovely silver since it had begun to rust. That seemed to have fixed the problem...until yesterday.

As a special treat, the shut off valve to the water heater doesn't work. You can turn it right and all it does is turn so in order to stop the small river, the water to the whole house had to be turned off. We decided to then follow the old adage from somewhere (probably a Third World country) about not flushing for #1. We did it after every 3rd use or so. One of us would run down and turn on the water and the one using it would flush and holler down the laundry chute when to turn it back off. Even in this short turnaround time, you could see the water leaking out from the base of the water heater. If someone had to do an even number, we would work as a team again for a flush afterward and then water off because there is just no need for that to be sitting around. As if this game plan wasn't bad enough, in comes a third hiccup - my nemesis "Aunt Flo" decides to arrive. This completely threw the 3rd use flush program we had followed out of the window and we had to use the even number flush program.

So this morning, we called Home Depot's At-Home Service since that was how we got the water heater and the installation of it. It is still under warranty but they were closed today (we learned afterward that it was probably yesterday's message being played) so Big A called GE's hotline and after explaining what the problem was, the guy said he would fax the information to the plumber that works with Home Depot and installs these (who we actually had called first but I guess there is a procedure one must follow for such things and that is to call the At-Home Services first). This is where it now gets confusing:

1. Big A calls Theresa back at the plumbing office and she says that we need to purchase a new one because they need some sort of information before they can set up a time.
2. We head out to the Home Depot closest to us but it is not the Home Depot where the first water heater was purchased from.
3. We head to the correct Home Depot and Susan at the customer service desk helped us a lot in getting everything settled and that included:

• calling the GE hotline again only to discover we didn't need to do that because they only get involved in the first year when the warranty also covers labor.
• calling Theresa again to let her know that GE won't be faxing them anything because they only get involved in the first year when labor is covered. We knew we would have to pay for labor so that wasn't a problem.
  
• paying for a whole new water heater so that Theresa gets the necessary purchase order to schedule the installation.
• supposedly getting reimbursed for the water heater I guess when the guy returns the unit.

I'm not feeling so confident on that last part but since this is my first time dealing with something that failed while under warranty, I'm trying to keep an open mind although I did put this all on the Home Depot card just in case there is any mix up along the way.

So now, sometime between 2-6 today, the plumber will be here to install it and when he leaves, (after also installing a new shut off valve as well), I'm just going to flush the toilet over and over for no reason at all, take a hot shower, and try to be grateful that of all the things that could go wrong, this was relatively minor.


Update: The plumber's here and it's only 2:43!