The Water Heater Fiasco

It's been over a month since we moved into our new house and we're settling in pretty well. It didn't take long for things to go wrong, though. I think we must have been there only a couple days when the water heater broke. Luckily it didn't flood but it was leaking from the bottom, which was fairly rusted. I had planned on replacing the water heater anyway with a more efficient one but I was hoping to delay that purchase a while since the one I wanted was a little pricey. This moved things up, though, so I ordered the water heater from a local supply place with the plan of installing it myself. It turned out to be a little more complex than I expected so I enlisted the help of the guy who does some drafting for me because he's also a licensed contractor.

Since most of the components are at the top of the heater, we had to extend the gas line and then run a new PVC split-venting system. Plus because of the hot water out location, we had to get a little creative in extending the existing pipes. This took about a day with a few extra runs to the hardware store but once we had everything in place it was time for the test run. There's actually an on-board computer and an ON/OFF switch so I turned it on and it started to initialize. But then came the disappointing part: it displayed an error message stating that the flame sensor was grounded. Arghh! I called the company and the guy said I should pull the sensor out see if was bent, which would lead it to touch metal and ground itself. I pulled it out and it was straight as an arrow. That was about the extent of the help he could give me so he gave me the name of someone local to call. I called him up and he came out the next morning and spent the morning taking various things apart and calling the water heater company. Eventually they decided that the control board had to be replaced so the company overnighted one to him but we weren't able to schedule another visit until the following week. So that was about one week without hot water.

When he came back and replaced the control board, the same message came up. So he gave up and said I would have to return it. I called the company to see what to do and they gave me the number of someone else. So these two guys came over and looked over everything and ran their own tests and finally decided they should replace the control board. Since the other guy already replaced it, I didn't think that was going to do any good but they sent out another control board and they came back to install it. And it worked!! For twelve beautiful hours the water heater worked and talk about efficient; it heated 50 gallons of water to 120 degrees in less than 10 minutes.

And then it happened, a new error message. This time it said it was the igniter, which I had seen the first guy pull out. Now that I felt like an expert on this thing, I pulled the igniter out and found a very small crack. So I called the company, who overnighted me a new igniter, and I replaced the bad one and the water heater has been ever working since. Except now we don't have hot water pressure, which is another story.


The fancy water heater.