The Water Heater Story

[Note: When I finally redid my website earlier this year, I thought I'd put this blog to bed and incorporate any new long-form posts into the website. That hasn't happened. So, once more unto the breach. The breach being in my water heater...]

Okay. Here’s the happy ending of the water heater story: I found a plumber who did what I wanted, which was to simply swap the old passively-vented unit for a new one, and did so for a reasonable price. He came today. It’s done. I want to hug him, but he’s from Lynn, and not a hugging guy.

Here’s the longer story. Despite the wonderful mock-up by Eric King, it's not quite enough to get a book out of, so you're going to get it here.

Eric King designed my last five books, and does these great parody covers as well.

What I’ve learned is this: Forget politics. Forget music. What do people REALLY want to talk about? Water heaters. The number of responses to my two Facebook posts… holy crap.

But seriously… what I’ve learned is that living in a high-income suburb like Newton, the five-star-rated plumbers who quickly return emergency calls and come within a day for a visit are extraordinarily expensive. Some of this is not unreasonable—I mean, you have to have a staff of people to be able to allocate some of them to emergency calls. And living here, it’s understandable that some folks prize customer service over cost. But even given that, some of the quotes I got were thievery.

To recap: On Sunday morning, Maire Anne and I found that we had no hot water. I went into the basement and found the water heater leaking. Fortunately, it hadn’t leaked much. I shut off the water valve and drained the rest into the basement sink.

Ruh roh.

When I began writing about this on Facebook, I said that the water heater was 16 years old. I knew this because when it was replaced, I did it myself, and in traditional macho-man fashion, messed up my back, from which it took years to recover. I wrote about it in Roundel Magazine, and again in my first book. I just checked the date of the magazine article. It was February 2005. With the magazine’s two-month lead time, that meant it happened in late fall/early winter 2004. So more like 18 years old.

Funny thing is, I was wrong, as when I checked the label on the water heater, I found it was manufactured in December 2015. Neither Maire Anne nor I have any recollection whatsoever of it being replaced seven years ago.

Ah, memory. I used to have one.

Anywhoo, on Sunday, I set out to get a plumber in. While I’d replaced the water heater myself in 2004, I had zero desire to do it again, as my recent re-injury of my back in late August has only partially healed, and I’d feel like an idiot if, after a month of twice-weekly physical therapy, I fucked it up again replacing another water heater. I’ve been fairly pain-free for a few weeks, but I know that my back is like a giant compressed spring wrapped up in Scotch tape that’ll go TWANG if I disturb it. So, yeah, while I COULD’VE gotten out of it by spending $600 to $900 at Home Depot for another passively-vented gas water heater and replacing it myself—even, for the moment, assuming that I had other muscle to get the old unit out and the new one in place—I knew that all that bending and crouching would mess me up.

And about that question of hired muscle… I did that once when I needed to dispose of a 32” Sony CRT that was on the 3rd floor of the house. The hired muscle was so incompetent that they were in danger of falling down the stairs with the television landing on them and suing me. So forgive me if I didn’t jump at the suggestion that all my problems would be solved by finding two guys on Craigslist to muscle the new heater into the basement and the old one out.

Plus, this is an odd installation. When our master bedroom was put into the attic in 1995, the brick chimney got taken down and was replaced with a horizontal vent pipe and a blower fan that exited the back of the house and vented both the furnace and the water heater. And when the garage was added onto the back of the house, that vent pipe was extended through the garage and a second blower fan installed at the end. There are sensors on the water heater that turn on both fans when the heater fires. When I replaced the water heater myself, I transferred these sensors over, and for some reason couldn’t get them to work. I had to call a plumber to figure it out.

The shared vent.

The tangle of sensors

For both of these reasons, I was perfectly happy with paying someone to show up with a new one, install it, and make the old one go away. I was expecting it would cost about two grand—roughly $1000 for the heater plus any odds and ends, and roughly another thousand for the labor.

I went to the Home Depot website and filled out the online form for “need water heater installed,” checking the “emergency” box. No one ever contacted me.

I began posting these travails on Facebook, and there was a strong contingent that said, basically, "If you don't take this opportunity to install a tankless water heater [one that flash-heats the water as it goes through, thereby providing unlimited hot water without needing to keep a 50-gallon tank hot], you're an idiot." I kept an open mind about it, but really, I just wanted hot water without having to pay for home infrastructure improvements.

I have a folder for house receipts, but couldn’t find the most recent big one for plumbing (we had the furnace replaced in 2008) or for the water heater that apparently was changed in 2015. I DID find a small receipt for a guy in Waltham. I asked my friend Alex, the contractor who’s done most of the work on the house, about this guy, and Alex said “He’s great, but he’s so expensive I no longer use him.”

I called him anyway. His voicemail had a “dial 1 to schedule an appointment, dial 0 if this is an emergency” message. I dialed 0. He called me back later that day, said that yes he could probably swap in another water heater for about $2,000, and that he could have a look on Monday. I told him that if he could do it for that price, absolutely. As part of this conversation, I asked him about a tankless water heater. As per prior FB post, he explained that it needed to be mounted against an outside wall, needed its own vent, and needed a bigger gas line, and that the cost would be 3-4 times that of a conventional water heater (so, $6,000 to $8,000). Since we have plenty of hot water from a standard 50-gallon tank, and since I think the odds of us staying in this house long enough to pay back the difference are slim, I had little interest in paying a premium for tankless.

But when this plumber came, he looked at the shared-venting two-fan thing, balked with concern about liability and code violations, and said he’d need to think about it. He called me back on Tuesday morning, said he didn’t want to touch the existing vent setup, and gave me a quote for a power-vented water heater (meaning a water heater that has its own vent motor integrated to the top of the heater). With the new ductwork required to give it its own vent, his quote came to $4,200. Yikes!

I caught my breath, thanked him for coming on Monday and calling me first thing on Tuesday, and said that I’d need to seek other quotes.

I then contacted a company in Watertown that was highly rated on a Newton-related Facebook group. They also had an emergency number, also called me back quickly, and scheduled an appointment for later that day, which was confirmed by voice, text, and email, so big points for communication. They sent over a young man who took a lot of photos and went back to his van a number of times to communicate with the mother ship. The very first thing he did was connect a pressure gauge to the outside hose spigot and noted that the water pressure was high, which he said could lessen the life of the appliances and cause warrantee issues.

He then told me that code in Massachusetts required a passively-vented water heater like mine to be vented vertically out the roof. With the water heater in the basement of this three-story house, you can imagine how invasive and expensive it would be to run a vent pipe out the ceiling. Therefore, he said, the replacement would need to be either power-vented or electric.

When he showed me the quote on his iPad for an electric unit, I nearly gagged. It read like the worst-imaginable fully-loaded new car quote from which you need to delete the extended warrantee, the undercoating, and the ermine mudflaps. The highest-level quote? $7,887 (yes, nearly EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS). It included a safety valve breaker shutoff for the feed to the water heater, an expansion tank, a corrosion protector, a $3,199 electric water heater (street price about $930), $1,400 to wire in a 220V outlet for the heater, and a $1,270 charge for a full warranty. If you pared it down to the essentials, it was $4,527 for just the electric water heater and the 220V wiring needed to run it.

In addition, there was a line item was to install a pressure regulator after the main water valve to knock down the high water pressure. The cost: $1,500. I later looked it up. The valve is a standard $200-ish item that I could order and sweat-solder on myself. Plus, Newton is known for having high water pressure, and it’s generally viewed as a positive thing.

Nuts, right?

So I tried again on three fronts. The first was I called a company in Dedham a good friend recommended, and left a message. I then tried Angi (formerly “Angie’s List”). Their water heater step-through process was quite good, having you specify gas or electric, tank or tankless, venting, and whether or not it was an emergency. The final checkbox said something about authorizing additional marketing from Angi’s representatives. I checked it with hesitancy, and gave my never-used landline and the email address I only use for one-time registrations.

But after that, Angi was pretty good. It gave you a list of matching vendors, showed their reviews, and had a push button to solicit quotes from them as well as a push button to get quotes from the top 15. I hand-selected three who sounded more like working plumbers and less like customer service organizations who happened to employ plumbers.

The third thing I tried was actually going to Home Depot to grok water heaters—look at them, measure them, shove them around, entertain the notion of installing one myself with help from Ethan. I found the candidate Rheem 12-year 50-gallon unit. The box said "160 pounds."

No.

On the way out of Home Depot, I stopped at the customer service desk and asked about buying a water heater and getting it installed.

"You have to go through the process online."

"I did."

"Is yours leaking? Did you check the emergency box?"

"Yes."

"And no one ever called you?"

"No."

"We can call installations directly for you."

"Call—you mean you'd be contacting someone who's not here in the building?"

"That's correct."

"Thanks, but no thanks."

The first call I got wasn’t from Angi’s—it was from someone at the company in Dedham. She said that they could have their plumber Dennis there at 8:30 Wednesday morning for an estimate. I was a little bit frazzled and said something like “I hate to waste anyone’s time. If Dennis is going to say that he can’t just swap out the existing heater with another one due to code issues, never mind, but if he can be more creative, yes, I’d love to get a quote.” I know, it was dumb. She hesitated a bit and said “You know, I don’t think I want to deal with you,” and I can’t say I blame her. I thought about it for a moment, called her back, pleaded my case of having just received two insanely high quotes, said that I may well have to suck it up and spend more than I’d like, and that, yes, if I haven’t burned my bridge, I’d like to have Dennis look at my system.” She scheduled it.

Shortly after, I got a call from Matt at Matt Evans Plumbing and Heating in Lynn, one of the plumbers I’d contacted via Angi’s (this turned out to be the ONLY response to the three requests I put out on Angi's). I described the situation and texted him photos of the unusual venting. He said “Yeah, I can just swap it out, no problem.” I said that I had another estimate scheduled for the morning, and that I was hesitant to have visits and estimates overlap—that I’d much rather do it one at a time—but that I’d be back in touch.

Dennis came at 8:30 am this (Wednesday) morning. I liked Dennis. Great south shore Massachusetts accent, no-nonsense way about him, yet also funny. He didn’t seem to think that the horizontal through-the-side-wall venting shared with the furnace was out of code, but he DID balk at the setup with two blower fans. He said he’d need to check if it was allowed by code, and if the fan manufacturer allowed it.

The vent and blower in the basement...

...and the continuation that runs out the back of the garage.

When I didn’t hear anything from Dennis by around noon, and had been without hot water for the fourth day, I messaged Matt. He called me shortly after and said “I don’t have anything today. I’m ten minutes from a Home Depot. I could pick up the water heater, have them call you to put it on your credit card and drive right to your house. I charge $650 flat install rate. Your electrical hookup is unusual, so I’d add $150 for that. Plus incidentals.”

“There’s a Home Depot 20 minutes north of me in Waltham," I said. "Are you SURE you don’t want to come here first and look at my setup?”

“Honestly, it won’t matter.”

“Uh... yes please!”

True to his word, about 30 minutes later, I got a phone call from Home Depot in Salem asking for my credit card for the water heater. I had him buy the Rheem 50-gallon with the 12-year guarantee, about $950 including tax. About an hour later, Matt and an assistant showed up with the water heater and had at it. Other than him not installing a drain pan under it (I just assumed he’d install one, but there hasn’t ever been one), and there being some challenges with getting the unusual triggering of the blower fan when the gas lights, requiring a trip to Home Depot for some fittings he didn't have, there were no surprises.

So it’s done. We have hot water again. And his bill was as quoted—just a shade over $900, an amount I was happy to pay. I bought them pizza as they were finishing, and tipped him. He left around 8pm to do another job on the north shore.

Yes!

I was never trying to get out of paying a plumber a reasonable amount. I just didn't want to be put over a barrel (which, perhaps appropriately, is the shape of the water heater).

So, if you’re local, BIG shout-out to Matt at Matt Evans Plumbing (https://www.mattevansplumbingandheating.com/). I often say that I’m an old-school guy in that doing what I say is important to me, and I have a lot of respect for that in others. Matt’s a young man, but he did exactly what he said he’d do. Nice to know that it's not just an old guy thing.