Now your in hot water!

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Death, taxes, and water heater failures.  Those are certainties we know for sure.  We have sloshed around in a few basements recently replacing water heater tanks that over stayed their welcome.  There really is no telling when your tank will decide to “spill it’s guts” all over your floor.  Two of the water heaters that we recently replaced were only 5 years old and 7 years old.  Unfortunately for the latter, the brand they had, and the brand we also install, Bradford White, offers a 6 year warranty on their tanks.  There was one similarity in both circumstances, well water.  Water heaters holding well water will almost always fail before their city water fed counterparts.

There are a few things you may wish to consider either now, or on your next water heater replacement.  Preventative maintenance is always a nice option if you just take the stance that your going to spend it anyway, might as well do it before it causes a problem and a mess. You can always replace the heater BEFORE it floods your basement.  From my experience, (this is not an official statistic) the average life expectancy of a water heater is about 8-12 years.  If you are over the 12 year mark, you are on borrowed time, ESPECIALLY, if you are on well water. Sure, there are tanks out there that are 20-25 years old.  Those are the exception to the rule, and very impressive. If you would like to gamble, or your heater is in an area where it won’t cause much of a mess or damage, you can simply maintain it.  Two things that will give the tank longer life would be annual, or semi-annual flushing of the tank and changing the anode rod every 3-5 years.  The anode rod is a piece of metal designed to sacrifice itself to the conditions of the water, thus protecting your tank. This may need to be done by a plumber.

Another option you have is to install a water heater pan and run a drain line to a floor drain.  If your water heater fails, or if the T&P valve opens, the pan will catch it and it will drain into your floor drain and not cause a mess. 

One last thing you can do is to install a water alarm.  The water alarm is a valve that is installed on the cold water inlet of your water heater and is designed to close when it detects water on the floor.  Keep in mind, when your water heater blows, it still has incoming water at FULL PRESSURE.  This means that if you are away from home or sleeping, if can potentially give off MUCH more than the 40-50 gallons that it holds!  The water alarm shutoff will prevent this. 

If your heater does decide that it has had enough of this life, turn off the water feed at the top of the tank, turn off the gas valve, attach a hose and let the draining begin! (And give us a call)

Do you hear water running??????

Riddle–Answer is up

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A farmer challenges a physicist, engineer and plumber  to fence off the largest area of land using the least amount of fence.

The engineer declared that making the fence in a circle would be the most efficient.

The physicist said that a fence that followed the equator around the world would fence off the greatest area (half the earth).

The plumber laughed at the others, and with his design, won the contest.  What did he do?

The plumber simply made a small fence around himself and said he was on the outside. 

Sometimes you just gotta think outside the box, er, fence! 

Flat rate or hourly?

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Recently, there seems to be a paradigm shift in the service plumbing industry in regards to how companies charge for their work.  It wasn’t too long ago that all plumbers and plumbing companies charged for their services on an hourly basis.  Now days, there seems to be a movement within the plumbing community to utilize a flat rate pricing model.  This sort of pricing is very similar to how most auto mechanics charge for their labor.  The companies that use this method of billing have a master pricing book, which is about 4 inches thick.  This book will show almost any possible plumbing scenario that could reasonably exist, and what it will cost you.  The advantage to this, is that you will know exactly what you are going to pay for the service performed ahead of time.  For some people, this is a must.  The disadvantage to this sort of billing, is that it will probably be more expensive at least 90% of the time.  Since there are almost no plumbing problems that will take the same amount of time to repair every time, the flat rate pricing book will account  for the worst. Simply put, you will pay for the worst case scenario of your particular repair EVERY TIME, no matter how long it took the plumber.   This is almost always a winning formula for the plumbing companies, and an expensive repair bill for the customer.  While most of our repair and service work at All Area Plumbing is done on an hourly basis, we do have a few of the most common jobs listed on our website with a set price.  The reason for this is to make it easier for our customers, and to help save us some time on the phones. 

The main advantage of an hourly plumbing company would be the add-ons or extras you may think of while we are there.  If you suddenly remember that your toilet is constantly running upstairs, or that you had a little drip coming from a shutoff valve, we aren’t gonna stick you with an additional charge of $100 or more.  It may actually cost you NOTHING!  Since we are already there, and either of those two things would most likely take less than a minute to fix, it wouldn’t even reflect on our time and your bill.  Obviously, our hourly pricing plan is not nearly as profitable on a job to job, or house to house basis as the flat rate companies.  We are confident that we will make up for that with many, very satisfied, repeat customers.