Minor Emergency

Had a bit of a house emergency yesterday.

While I was home at lunch, while letting critters in/out through the back door, something in the corner of the laundry room caught the tail of my eye.

Steam coming out of the hot water tank!

Sent a message to Maxx at work, who said to just switch off the breaker for the tank for now, and then he got permission to come home early ... and when I showed up to pick him up I spoke with my supervisor about the situation, so he sent a message to scheduling to use 5 of my vacation hours to get the rest of the day off.

We did have to pick up some supplies ... We needed to check the temperature to make sure it wasn't that the tank itself was getting way too hot, not just the release valve failing, and of course our "people" thermometer doesn't go up as high as we needed (that would be quite the fever!).

Maxx got the panel off the side of the tank so we could check what the water temperature is set to, and the temperature was right on the money, so the poor man had to crawl around under the house looking for the shut off valve, so we could swap out the release valve on the tank itself.

Apparently, while we have three sinks, two toilets, one shower, one tub, and one washing machine ... there are TONNES of valves on the pipes under the house.  Some of the pipes are even orphaned, so they don't have any water in them and don't connect anywhere.  He ended up finding the main shut of valve near the front of the house, so we got that taken care of and were able to swap the valve.  By the time we were done, it was after 8pm, but we should be good to go now, although I'll be checking into provincial and federal programs for performing energy upgrades, to see if we could get something back for replacing the tank with a tankless hot water system or hot water on demand system.

So, glad this didn't happen when Merry was still with us.  The top of the hot water tank was one of his "spots" because it was nice and warm.  If the valve had gone and shot steam into his face to scald him, I would have been just devastated!