Water Heater

Snapping Twig

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Got home from a ride in the late afternoon on the 31st. As I was changing out from leathers to regular clothes, I looked at the furnace and noticed water pooling under it.

The only source of water there is the water heater next to it.

I put on shoes and had a look - good size leak from the bottom of the water heater, blown tank for sure.

Shut down the incoming water, got online to Lowe's and bought a new 50 gal. Whirlpool.

Had just enough time to fire up the truck and run down there to get it. They closed early for New Year's that day - 6p.

Swapped it out and inspection of the old unit showed rust - lots of it.

I use copper nipples, but I never swapped out the anode, so I got 10.5 of the 12 years out of the warranty.

Tried to remove the anode just to see what it looked like on the old unit and it was frozen in place, so anode it is.

I'll buy and store one for this new unit, replace at 5 years needed or not, just to play safe.

This is just a small token of the last couple months here at casa buena.

Washed my smart phone. Tired, working on Saturday doing favors for customers, forgot to take it out of the pants pocket. Calendar and customer records, contacts - lost.

New phone lasted 2 months, fell of the moto on the freeway. See ya! Bye Bye!

Furnace crapped out one cold morning. Would not fire up.

Checked YouTube vids for my model, did the tests, wall register at fault. Replaced and all's well.

I filter my main water line into the house. After 15 years one of the sweat joints started a drip. I need not expound on the merits of the "new" lead free solder here in the PRC, let me just say that the real stuff works better.

One fine Friday evening about 3 weeks back, Mrs. Twig wanted ice cream, but it was soup - fridge down. Fortunately I fix these things for a living, so a new compressor start relay and it's working better than it has for quite a while.

I started the 31st with a broken reclining sofa. Mrs. Twig doesn't believe the warnings about how to unrecline it, breaking the mechanism and such.
Fixed it, upgraded the broken part to a larger diameter bolt.

Busy month or two. Could have been expensive. Well, the phone part was...

My Dad taught me to fix things and I have him to thank for that sage advice. Turning major problems into blips and avoiding service calls pays for itself many fold.

Still, everything going sideways at the same time leads me to believe that all our machines are in the same union and if you flog one, they all break out of solidarity.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

:)
 
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Got a call from my son New Year's Eve.They came home from work to find 3" of water in their 3rd (top)floor apt.Seems the builder installed the sprinkler lines above the celing in a climate that can drop way below zero in the winter [emoji57]
 
Since I work in the avionics/electronics field I get to fix all sorts of things around the house. Of course Mrs. Quick10 gets upset at times because she thinks she might get the new version.

For the record I agree on the solder, it sucks. I too, had to replace a water heater due to a leak.
 
We just replaced our water heater with help from a local handyman.

He made sweating the copper joints look easy and claims that for the lead-free plumbing solder, his hotter MAP gas torch is the key. It looked like a standard torch with a bottle of MAP gas in place of the usual propane. He was also very generous with a paste type flux and cleaned the joints thoroughly.

33V969_AS01
 
Even a MAP gas torch is often borderline for the usual copper brazing.
Do a lot of that doing A/C work.. I use the regular oxi- acetylene
rigs for a good hot flame. I do agree, a hot torch is the key to good
joints. You want to silver solder to flow like hot butter.
 
Mapp gas works fairly well with modern solder,but it can still take awhile to get heavy brass fittings hot enough..I miss lead solder [emoji45]
 
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