A month or so ago I woke up to find a pool of water on my dining room table and the floor nearby. I looked up to see this…
Yep, pretty sure those brown stains aren’t supposed to be on the ceiling.
Panicked, I ran out to the garage and grabbed the ladder so I could make a closer inspection of the ceiling. As I climbed the ladder, a few drops of water went by. Deifinitely not supposed to happen! I poked the brown stain on the cornice with my finger and it was basically a mushy mess. In fact I could push my finger right through it. Oh crap.
After an emergency phone call to dad (who knows everything) I called a plumber. He asked me if I’d been up into the roof and had a look. Ummm, no. Not going to happen. There’s spiders up there, hundreds of them. 30 minutes later he was up in my roof himself, and returned with bad news. The (very) old electric hot water service was cracked and the drip tray was rusted through. Get it fixed ASAP was his advice. Fastforward a couple of weeks later and I have this monstrosity attached to the wall of my house.
Definitely not pretty. But I’ll forgive it’s ugliness (and the fact it set me back close to $2000) because it is amazing. My hot water pressure is so much better now. And it runs on natural gas so I should start to see savings in my electricity bills. Also, I was planning to install one of these later (much later!) this year anyway. And it will no doubt add value to the house. Unfortunately, I now have to add ‘fix water damage on kitchen ceiling’ to my never ending to-do list. Sigh.
Life at Number 21 
I’m looking at installing one of these as our water pressure is shocking, it piddles out of the shower. How plumbing work was involved to link it up to your existing pipes? Like did they have to make holes in walls? Ta 🙂
Hey Anna, thanks for stopping by! The plumbers were here for about 3 hours all up – not too many holes in the walls apart from where they had to attach the unit onto the wall. I think the process of linking it up to the existing gas pipes was relatively simple. I also had to get electricians in to install that power point beside it. No complaints with this hot water service, money well spent!