Hot Water Heater Problem

Today we had a problem with out hot water heater. I was sitting in the kitchen when I heard an unusual noise coming from the basement. I went down to check it out.

I immediately saw water on the floor. Lots of it. There was also a strange sound coming from the hot water heater. I looked around and saw there was water coming out of the bottom of the water heater in fast drips. I started cleaning up the water and directing the flow to the closer floor drain by the sinks. Most of the water had been going across the basement and then along the wall to the floor drain at the front of the house.

We have a service contract with Reimer Heating and Plumbing. It was a Sunday morning at 11 am and I called them to report the problem. They promised a technician would come by today and inspect the water heater. In the meantime I closed the valve for the water entering the heater. A few minutes the water stopped coming out of the bottom of the heater. The problem was that the water throughout the house stopped coming out of pipes. I waited a little bit and then turned the valve back on. Over the next few hours we did have water but not hot water.

In the meantime I went online to do a little researching of the problem. Mostly it had to do with our hot water heater aging out. It was just about ten years old. I saw that hot water heaters generally last between 8 and 12 years which makes ours about average for failure. The problem looked like it was leaking from corrosion at the base of the heater which is a very common problem for old water heaters. 

I started researching new heaters including the newer tankless water heaters both gas and electric. It looked like we were probably going to spending some serious money to get a new hot water heater.

The technician came by around 4:30 and looked at our heater problem. I highly recommended a new one which we were expecting. He was very knowledgeable and spent some significant time going over our basement plumbing and gas line layout. He mapped out where the new appliance would go and where the pipes would run. It was a big job because of the basement pipe situation and the labor would be a large percentage of the cost.

He used his tablet to map out the pipe installation and the set up of the gasless heater on the back wall. There would also need to be exhaust pipes going outside but the back porch made it necessary to run the pipes out the side along the walkway to the backyard. I would have rather had on the other side of the house but that was just too much work redoing all of the pipes in the basement including both water and gas.

He came up with a total cost $8,656.08. He sent me the estimate to my email.

He said the work could be done on Tuesday morning which meant we had one more day of water issues.