A narrow miss for the Wooten household today. I had just returned from picking up Karen’s mom from the airport, and met Karen in the garage, only to be met by the distinctive smell of burning plastic in the basement.
I sniffed around for a bit, thinking most likely given my luck with consumer electronics, that it was the nearly new HDTV that had blown a transformer or some such. However the TV seemed to work just fine. Then I remembered we had a fairly large electric hot water heater under the stairs in the basement. Sure enough the smell seemed to be from there, but I could not isolate it.
Since a house less than a block from us had just burned down, I looked up Seattle fire department on Google. I called the number closest to my house. “I smell burning wires,” I said. The nice woman said, “Hang up and call 911 right now”. So I called 911, kind of with trepidation. Anyway the fire folks came in under 2 minutes. Very impressive.
They looked around, and sure enough were somewhat concerned. Then the nice fireman put his hand on the hot water heater and noticed it was hot… “It shouldn’t be hot, the hot part is behind the insulation”. Another firman broke out his handy leatherman tool and riped off a panel. Pretty obvious where the fire was once he did that!
Turns out our 22 year old hot water heater had sprung a leak at the TOP. And it was dripping down into the control circuits and thermostat. It shorted them out, and the breaker only “HALF” blew. So it proceeded to catch the insulation on fire. Oh and the poor guy who’s house burned down… the LED display in his DVD player shorted and gutted the whole house at 5am. (The nice firemen who helped me were first on the scene of that one).
In the picture below, you can see some of the blackened insulation at the top of the panel (the back of the panel was all blackened/burned as well).
In the closeup, you can see the plastic on the thermostat had started to bubble and can see some of the burnt insulation there as well.
So they turn off the breaker and leave. Now I have to find a hot water heater and FAST. I once again turned to man’s best friend and entered “hot water heater” . A link for Home Depot comes up, and I call the 1-800 #. Fortunately I just made it under the “If you call before 1:30pm we will deliver and install a new water heater the same day” deadline.
An hour later Dave from Fast Water Heater shows up with a brand new water heater. He was an artist. He pulled the old one out– FULL of water! He installed a new one, with flex pipes and an emergency shutoff valve, he also put in earthquake straps. He did this all in about an hour and a half. This guy can solder copper pipe about as fast as any human alive. Almost worth the ridiculous amount of money I paid just to watch this guy work. The masterpiece is shown below.
