Getting Into Hot Water

 Ah, the joys of owning a home, one of which is maintaining said home so it can continue to provide shelter without endangering you and yours. The range of maintenance you can do yourself will vary with your skills, training, budget, and time, but preventative maintenance is always cheaper than repair or replacement.

We all like hot water. It's not essential, but it makes cleaning clothes and dishes much easier and bathing our bodies more comfortable. Hygiene is important in everyday life, and it becomes more important if TSHTF and medical facilities are scarce or overloaded. Cold showers suck, and back when I had to shave every day having hot water meant I could do so without bleeding all over the place. Think about it: what's the first thing you want to do after coming home from a camping trip or a long day of hard work? A hot shower will be on the top of the list for most people.

Type of Hot Water Heaters

Most homes and apartment buildings will have a water heater hidden somewhere in a utility closet or corner of the basement. Water heaters are a common household appliance, but they have the potential to become bombs if not maintained. I won't link to them, but there are plenty of videos on the Internet of the devastation caused by exploding water heaters. One of the insurance companies runs an ad on TV that mentions covering damage from a water heater that landed on a neighbor's car. Mythbusters covered them pretty well; the one video I saw had a 50 gallon tank launch itself 500 feet into the air. That's enough force to send a hundred pounds of tank through several floors and walls.

Electricity, liquid propane (LP), or natural gas (NG) are the main power sources for heating water, although I have seen wood-fired water heaters and add-on heat exchangers for wood stoves. Remote or limited-use facilities may have a tiny point-of-use heater tucked under the sink to provide hot water for personal hygiene. There are “tankless” water heaters available, but they're expensive and require more maintenance. There are also municipal hot water systems in large cities that provide very hot water or steam to buildings near a generating plant (sometimes as a byproduct of generating electricity), but that's beyond our control, so the maintenance for it is outside the scope of prepping. The same goes for living in an apartment building, since the owner has control over the central utilities. Let's stick to the common tank style water heaters that you'll find in home improvement stores for today.

Tank-style water heaters come in a variety of sizes and use the three heat sources I mentioned (electric, LP, or NG) depending on what's available. A lot of new houses are “all-electric”, while rural areas lack the NG pipelines found in town and have to rely on LP stored on-site. Electric units don't need to be vented (no combustion, no exhaust) while the gas units are more efficient and “recover” faster in my experience. They all have the same basic design: a vertical tank with cold water inlet and hot water outlet on the top, anode rod inserted through the top, heat source at or near the bottom, drain valve on the bottom, and a relief valve (T&P valve) on the side or top. They also all share a few ways to ruin your day.

Temperature & Pressure

The T&P valve is a safety device that will open and vent the tank if the temperature (T) or pressure (P) gets too high. Water expands when heated, and some expansion is expected and the tanks are engineered for it. Since water heaters are a closed system except for when the water is in use, this expansion leads to an increase in pressure. If the pressure gets above 150 psi, the T&P valve should open and relieve the pressure by venting water to a drain. The valve will also open if the temperature gets to about 210°F, which is just short of boiling. Boiling water produces steam, which takes up 1700 time as much space as liquid water (at standard pressure). Water heater tanks are not designed as boilers and will explode if the water inside starts to boil. 

By most building codes, the T&P valve has to be piped to a drain with an air gap between the end of the pipe and the drain, so that you can see water flowing if the valve opens or is leaking. Testing the T&P valve a couple of times a year will let you know that it isn't leaking, stuck, or plugged. Having a stuck or plugged relief valve is the same as not having a relief valve, so read the instructions on the tag or look up how to test your particular valve.

Hard Water and Sediment

If you have hard water or a lot of sediment in your water, sand and scale will settle out on the bottom of the tank. This layer of sediment will act as an insulator, causing the heat source to run longer to heat up the water and potentially overheat the water. A water heater that has a lot of sediment will start to take longer to recover after use, so watch for longer intervals between having hot water. If the thermostat sensor that controls the heating element or burner gets covered, you can have a runaway heater that will stay on until something pops. 

The drain valve on the bottom of the tank is there so you can shut the heater down once a year and drain the sediment out. Most drain valves are threaded for garden hose fittings, which makes it easy to connect to,  but you don't want to run hot water through a garden hose because they'll melt. Instead, turn off the heat and either let the heater cool down or open a faucet to let cold water in to cool it.

Popping

If you ever hear a “popping” noise coming from your water heater while it's in operation, that's a sign that you have scale building up. Water trapped between layers of scale will boil and “pop” as the steam escapes into the water. Old, limed-up teapots make the same noise and will often bounce or move on the stove when they do. This is from the energy released by the steam as it hits the water around it; now imagine your 40-50 gallon water heater “dancing” in the basement rather than a half-gallon teapot on the stove. 

Any movement of an appliance attached to gas lines needs to be accounted for, so make sure your gas line have a flexible section where it connects to the heater. They're usually yellow in color to designate that they carry a flammable gas. Gas leaks in a basement are a good way to destroy a house! I've seen it happen a few times; one was fairly minor and it blew out every window and lifted the house off of the foundation. A few others I've driven by looked like a tornado had hit the house, with nothing but a hole in the ground surrounded by debris.

Rusting

Most tanks are made of steel and will rust on the inside. This is minimized by the use of a sacrificial anode rod of zinc or some other metal that is more reactive than iron. The sacrificial rod will slowly erode over a few years and should be replaced when it is almost gone. The rod is usually threaded into the top of the tank and replacements can be found in home improvement stores. If your hot water starts to look reddish or develops a sulfur smell, it's time to replace the sacrificial rod; not replacing it means allowing the tank walls to get thinner as they rust away, which reduces the pressure that it can withstand. That rust will also add to the sediment building up on the bottom of the tank that I mentioned above.

Avoiding trouble is one of the tenets of prepping, so do your maintenance. If you have any doubts about your ability to work on anything, call a professional or get the training. Plumbers and electricians are expensive, but not as expensive as a house fire or cleaning up after burst pipes.

Basic Plumbing: Toilet Repair

I am not a plumber. I've never claimed to be a plumber, I don't want to be a plumber,  I've never played one on TV, and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

None of that is any slight against plumbers. Quite the contrary, I have great respect for my comrades who are experts in the dark arts of liquid supply and removal, for they have a skill set that is very valuable. They also happen to know this fact, and therefore calling a skilled tradesman for basic repairs can be very expensive for fixes you can often do on your own. Today, that repair is fixing a toilet that won't stop running.

A constantly flowing toilet is fairly simply fixed by replacing the flapper and fill assembly in the tank. The repair kit is inexpensive, and the repair takes all of about 15 minutes. When you're done, you'll save water and money, and have a toilet that flushes much better. The kit includes complete instructions, but there are a couple high points worth hitting.

First you'll need to shut off the water to your toilet. There should be a hose behind and below the toilet, with a valve near the wall or floor. Closing this valve turns off the water to your toilet. If you don't have a valve on this hose, stop now, as this has become a much more advanced job! Once the water has been turned off, remove the lid from the tank and flush the toilet until all of the water is out of the tank.

The shutoff valve for my toilet. A quarter turn to the right shuts the water off.

Replace the guts according the the instructions, making sure to clean any loose debris in the tank. The rubber seals tend to degrade over time, and can make a mess or gum up the works. If you use a bleach block in your toilet, be sure to wear rubber gloves to prevent chemical burns.

After you're done replacing everything, turn the water back on and let the tank fill. I recommend giving the commode a couple good flushes, just to make sure everything is working properly, then replace the tank lid, and bask in the glory of a job well done.

The aforementioned guts. All of this except the white flush arm and the black tube assembly on the left get replaced.

Lokidude

Oooh, That Smell

A good friend contacted me the other day. She said her sink drain had a terrible stink, and asked if there was anything I could do to help. I told her it was a problem I'd heard of before, and I had a few tricks up my sleeve that I would be happy to employ.

A foul smelling sink is an indicator that something nasty is in your drain. Nasty things in your drain need to be killed and flushed out of that drain. There are a couple ways to do this, and with the smell she described, I rounded up the whole arsenal.

The first trick I gave her was to pour boiling water down both of her drains. This is great for clearing things like grease and fat residues that can go rancid and smell horrid. Boiling water made a bit of a difference, but it definitely didn't fix the problem. When I got to her place, I confirmed that her sink really did smell as bad as she had described, so I broke out my $5 anti-smell arsenal and got to work.

The first thing I did was pour about a pint of white vinegar down each drain, then I put her drain stoppers in place and filled each sink about half full with the hottest water her system would put out. I let the vinegar sit in the drains while I prepared the second half of my knockout combo.

Plain old grocery store lemons make up the second half of this dynamic duo. By the time I finished cutting them in half, it was about time to pull the stoppers and flush the vinegar and anything it had broken loose.

It's important to flush your pipes between different cleaning agents to prevent possible bad reactions. While lemons and vinegar are both mild acids and won't cause a problem, if you were to use an acid and a base cleaner, you could get a very impressive and possibly dangerous reaction. Other cleaners (notably things like ammonia and bleach) combine to make lethally toxic fumes. Flush your drains well to prevent dangerous chemistry!

I squeezed the juice from the halved lemons down the non-disposal side, which led straight to her P-trap. We then cut the lemons into much smaller chunks and fed them to the garbage disposal one lemon at a time. (Any time you run your disposal, you want to run the sink faucet full-blast into it to flush the bits down the drain, and this process is no exception.) The acid and oil in the lemons make a wonderful cleaning agent, and the rind provides just enough abrasive to scrub away any lingering undesirable wastes.

The combo cut the smell dramatically, and hopefully as she keeps running water down her drains it will continue to dissipate. If not, there are some commercial products that are far more aggressive. Most drains can be cleaned with this method though, and it is both very safe and cheaper than a large at Starbucks.

Lokidude