Hot water heaters, and HD tv

So about three weeks ago, on a Thursday, we discovered something kinda terrible.  Our hot water heater was leaking.  Say it with me, "Oh farg!"

Let me preface.
A week or two before then we received a special offer from our television provider to upgrade to high definition tv for free! WAIT, hold the phone, FREE you say.  I'm down with free; we're like homies you know.  So being the good wife I am I called our television provider and made the appointment. 

Fast forward to three Thursdays ago, the day of our appointment.  Marty was getting everything ready for the technician, pulling out the old box, binding wires together, getting the console cabinet cleaned up and ready for that shinny new HD receiver box when he discovered the leak.  I was actually at the mall (the new wal-mart, the kids have resorted to calling it the mall because it's the biggest thing we have in our dinky little town) when I got the text.

"Guess what we get to buy?"

Was this good, was this bad, I didn't know, so I replied, "what?"

"A new hot water  heater."

Okay, it wasn't good, in-fact it was bad.    

I came home from the mall regretting the money I'd just spent.  I knew a hot water heater wouldn't be cheap.  Marty showed me the leak and while it wasn't gushing there was a definite leak.  A trip to the big box store was in the plans for that weekend.

Friday after work we headed to the box store and several hundred dollars later we were driving home with a new 80 gallon tank.  Now, I am usually a glass half full kinda gal, and determined to make lemonade out of this lemon I was pretty happy we were getting a bigger tank.  This also gave us the opportunity to relocate the tank down into the garage instead of under the stairs, something we'd been talking about for well, years.  The only down side to this was I was going to have to get under the house to help Marty.  Cue screaming.  "THERE ARE SPIDERS DOWN THERE!"

Here is the old tank, in the closet under the stairs. You can see the under house access here. Yes I had to crawl down in that little hole. Shudders. Marty actually spend more time down there than me, but still I'm kinda a baby when it comes to spiders. They really freak me out.



Here is all the lovely corrosion on the pipes of the old heater. Our house was built in 1955 and all of the plumbing in galvanized. Nice, I know. I'm actually surprised we didn't have to replace this thing sooner than we did.



Together, it only took us 4 hours to drain the old tank, move it out of the closet, re-plumb the water lines to where the new tank would go, move the electrical, hook up the old tank, check for leaks, and fill her up! Oh, and two more trips to the local hardware store for fittings and crap.

Here she is in all her glory!



Ah, glorious HOT water. I mean wow! It's been almost three weeks since we put this baby in and I have yet to run out of hot water in the shower. I LOVE THIS THING! How we lived with a 50 gallon tank and 5.5 people in our house I'll never know.