10 lessons from a broken water heater, or how I spent my holiday weekend

My basement is leaking from every orifice. We had no problems when Chicago flooded a few months back, but now it is water water everywhere. At the beginning of the month there was a leak from where our furnace, central air and humidifier are clustered together. Due to an initial misdiagnosis that still hasn’t been fixed, but there is an HVAC guy scheduled to come this week. Then on Saturday there was water from a different corner of the basement. This time it was the water heater.

Here on my thoughts after 3 days with a broken water heater.

1. Forty gallons is a lot of water particularly when it is pouring out onto your basement floor without a drain nearby.
2. Three day weekends are not so great when that extra day is just prolonging your ability to get a new water heater because the supplier is closed.
3. The automatic dishwasher does not work when the hot water is turned off.
4. Doing dishes by hand is even more of a chore when you have to heat water on the stove to do it.
5. Heating water on the stove to do dishes is nothing compared to trying to heat enough to get bathwater up to a temperature that will not make children scream.
6. After all your water heating efforts the children will still scream.
7. The type of shower with a single lever rather than separate controls for water pressure and water temperature does not work at all when the hot water is off. Luckily our other bathroom uses a different mechanism, which allowed me to discover that…
8. Cold showers are cold. Also…
9. Sometimes when you are disoriented from being groggy and forced into a completely different shower routine your best intentions of keeping the shower short by only conditioning your hair instead of washing it can be spoiled when you inexplicably put body wash in your hair thus needlessly extending the unpleasant cold shower experience.
10. Those of us who regularly have the luxury of hot water on demand should be incredibly grateful for as annoying all of the above are they are truly what Twitter would refer to as #1stworldproblems.

Between a broken water heater and broken air conditioner I’m really going to get my money’s worth out of our home warranty this year. Hopefully both of these issues will be resolved this week.

So how was your weekend?

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