Eeeeeww....Gross!

Today's post has nothing to do with poo. 

Seriously.

No poo. 

Instead, I bring you the story of a water heater gone over to the dark side.

Our home is only 3 1/2 years old. Way too soon to have major appliances and systems breaking down. Unfortunately, no one told one of our water heaters that. Over the past year one of them has given us many problems. The builder still covers the unit under warranty but we have to pay labor every time they send the plumber out. After several visits and months of sometimes working/sometimes leaking and making messes, we finally just turned it off and got by with just one water heater. (Hey, sometimes when you ignore a problem, it goes away. Right? Yeah, not so much.) 

So earlier this week I was a laundry tackling fool, cranking through load after load of dirty clothes, towels and bedding. I was kicking laundries buttox. That's when I noticed that there was water seeping through the ceiling in the kitchen. Oh craptastic! I dashed upstairs and ran into the attic to see that there was water all over the floor right in front of the water heaters. I looked everywhere but couldn't find the source of the water. No water was leaking form the heaters, none from the pipes, the roof, nothing. All I could do was go back downstairs, turn off the water to the whole house and call Chris. When he got home he checked too and could not tell where it came from, so he turned the water back on and when he did, a huge wad of snot-looking stuff shot out of the emergency release valve on the bad heater. 

The next day Chris called the builder who made arrangements to replace the defective water heater. Apparently turning off a defective heater full of water is not such a good thing. When they began to unhook it, all the nasty stagnant rusty water in the heater drained down into our pipes. No one told me this could or would happen. I found out the hard way. I turned on the tap and something looking like root beer began to flow out. I flushed all the taps for 30 minutes before the water was completely clear again. 

I took this picture after 15 minutes of flushing. Anyone want a glass of water????