To give you just a sense of what it’s been like, here’s the email I sent to my group at $FIRM early on Thursday morning:
Subject: Not going to be in office today Multiple appliance fails. Hot water heater wasn't making hot water, assumed pilot light fail. No, no, a partial containment fail instead, with leaking to carpets, yay! But most of the water went to the sump, and left the building appropriately. Cleaned up some water until time to feed and walk the dog. Heading out to do that, the garage door opener played up, badly. Repeat of winter problems that we tolerated until they went away. Need a working garage door opener. Bought one and installed it last night. Went downstairs late to check on sump, because of flickering lights indicative of sump still running ... odd since I shut off the water on the water heater. Hmmm, heat from the pit, and continuous humming. Sump pump lunched itself yesterday. Okay, that I can deal with today, since things are dry and there's no rain in the forecast .... Sigh. The overnight thunderstorm had me downstairs and bailing for about an hour, and checking the pit through the rest of the night, with occasional bails. Next, I'm going to go get a new sump pump and install it, then rest a bit while waiting for the plumber to get here to see what's next with the water heater. Text me if you need me for something, I'll check email a few times today.
The good news is that we now have working hot water, and non-cold water showers (yay). Yes, cold water is way better than NO water, but … First World Problems. The story I’m going to be sticking with is that the house got jealous that Marcia is getting upgraded next week (hip replacement), and decided to jump into the game.
ALL of the plumbing/HVAC companies are busy, busy, busy – this was the first “hot” week of summer, and the AC business is booming. Our regular folks (a smaller firm) couldn’t get us on the schedule until next week. So I turned to Angie’s List, and got onto Jiffy Plumbing in Hyattsville. They sent around one of their mechanics, Bawla, yesterday afternoon to check the system and give us a quote. He did, we got two others which didn’t please us as much, and scheduled for today. He arrived today within the scheduled window, installed a State Water Heater, and we’re very happy.
Oh, yeah, and it was a good thing that I purchased and installed that new sump pump on Thursday morning. On Thursday afternoon, we got the better part of an inch of rain in about an hour, and that pump survived its trial by fire … err, water.
