With your item you could drive around to 5 hardware stores or plumbing supply places and likely still come up empty.
How did you learn to fix all these things yourself?
We briefly thought of moving to the suburbs years ago, but the husband unit can hang pictures and change lightbulbs, but not much more, and he swears like a sailor through most household maintenance tasks.
I grew up in a house and there was always something.I think my father had our plumber on speed-dial.
We stayed in the city. Although I sometimes call them, āThe Gonifs of the Basement,ā there are men who work in our building who are brilliant at fixing things. Ziggy from Poland and Dino from Albania could fix anything!
I started watching This Old House in the early 1980ās. Iāve seen every episode of This Old House, Ask This Old House, and The New Yankee Workshop.
I also learned A LOT from watching all of Mike Holmes shows.
Very into all of this stuff. I can fix just about anything. Would have done my own water heater but donāt have anyone here that can lift things like that. I can sweat pipes. Everyone around here has moved over to ProPress which Iām not a fan of but what are you gonna do?
Plumber tells me he didnāt want to breathe in any more of that crap as he took a hit off his vape. LOL
I work on all of our cars too. Just did the spark plugs and 3 of 4 door lock actuators on my daughters Corolla. Mechanic wanted $2200 to do the job. Cost me $265 in parts and less than 3 hours. YouTube came in very handy on the actuators.
Great question. Itās not code around here. I know itās done in most areas though.
Our old house didnāt have one either. My Dadās house on Long Island has 2 of them.
That water heater failed from corrosion. The last one lasted 12 years which isnāt bad.
ETA - Old house also in NYC borough. The crew we had in here this week are pros. They spend most of their time doing new construction and renovations. If it was needed, it would be there. Believe me, they were here to make money.
Arenāt there, āTankless,ā water heaters now? A friend installed one in her country house upstate and it looked quite high-tech, and brought hot water for showers upstairs very quickly.
Iāve got an issue here with that. Water heater is on the driveway side of the house. Itās min code width - 8 feet.
Those require these big ugly pipes for intake and exhaust. Thereās a window above where they are. That means I would have this snake of pipes taking up valuable real estate and making things look unpleasant.
I have mentioned this in another thread a long time ago. I need to take pic of the houses around here that have them. The pipes are enormous around this area by code. Looks industrial. Not what you would see in any other area - 4" grey plastic. Here they are metal and huge.
Canāt easily vent them up the chimney which is shared with the forced air furnace. Itās complicated AND expensive
@Dogtamer - Just looked up the codeā¦ It appears there should be expansion tanks. Very interestingā¦ Next time one of them blows up, Iāll look into it. For now, done dealing with the water heater situation.
The inner workings of our bathroom faucet got clogged up (not the aerator). I had to take the faucet off and blow it out with my compressor several times before it was cleared. Took 2 hours yesterday.
Everything is perfect now and the water heaters are bridged now so if one breaks, we can use the other for the whole house.
Yes, I did. I was frugal in my younger days, lived on a 48-foot sailboat in the 1980s. made my money in computers, and I was an early adopter of the āwork remotelyā approach. Buying a house in a vacation area is a decent investment if one can find a good property management company to handle renting it out when one is away.
Amazon is a small part of sales of a product that I make that is used by beekeepers. I retired early from computers, bought a farm in Virginia, and started keeping bees, hence the interest in beekeeping. I signed the farm over to my son, lives there and runs the farm, no bees for him, he grows hay for spoiled dressage, jumping, and show horses.
I should add that one of the joys of my life was to give my son a Stickley Craftsman bungalo and 680 acres of land with no mortgage. It instantly made him a free man, as he was indebted to no one, and could always be sure of āa livingā even if just leasing out the acreage to another farmer. His late mother and I worked hard to restore that place to its 1930s glory, and he grew up in the house, so it was more āhisā than āmineā. I am homesick for places Iāve yet to visit. The German word āFernwehā means literally āfarsicknessā, but there is no English word for this.
I still maintain A.O. Smith water heaters in many of our properties, but most of those real estate holdings have long-since been converted - or supplemented - with either gas- or electric-powered versions of āTanklessā installations.
Generally, Iām satisfied with having done this, and having helped family and friends do the same over the last 40 years - but thereās a reason why our Service Industry entity which engages in the Plumbing & Heating trade sees an increasing number of service tickets focused upon such installations.
Thatās why I posed that question; thereās a reason why I administer - in somewhat of a āmercenaryā fashion, admittedly - Masters Licenses in a variety of states, and in a variety of trades, where permits-pulling by contractors require such a reference to an acknowledged authorityās blessing.
You were hinting at this the other day before the plumber came. Wish you would have just come right out with it. Wouldnāt have offended me.
I didnāt even think about it because this was a new build with a signed off inspection from the city. Builder must have greased the inspector OR the code changed since 2006.
@Dogtamer There is a backflow preventer on the system going back to the city so itās a closed system which would require an expansion tank. With that said, there are a lot of pipes in this house and the cold water is common. 5 bathrooms, 2 kitchens and 3600 total feet - thereās likely enough pipe to soak up some expansion here. Maybe thatās the difference. I will find out for sure at some pointā¦
Whozzit and I grew up in NYC apartments (Queens/Brooklyn) where renters donāt fix anything. We moved to Cali suburbs in 1980.
So which is worse ā a spouse who canāt do squat, or one who thinks he can do everything, and then takes this side of forever to do it? I recently bought a new porch light and wanted to call my favorite handyguy to install it, but Whozzit was āOh no! We can do this!ā (and note the āweā.) 7 days and 7 hours later, two people working, for a job that the contractor couldāve finished in 30 minutes ā and then Whozzit went outside 4x a day for the next week to make sure it hadnāt crashed yet.
Wow I fell behind. Just planted the tomatoes and the cucumbers and the peppers. The Pumpkins have been in the ground for some time now. Our humble little garden also came with grapes (with seeds, oh well) A few apple trees (no fruit yet) a surprise white peach tree (Had no idea what it was till last year it had peaches on it!) and blueberries. I started a few too many pepper plants so 3 are being potted and going into the āhot houseā (Harbor freight green house).
While itās raining here, no time like today to get this stuff done. I forgot but I will grab a pic of the valve box with the bilge pump in it. It has been working very well.
RE expansion tanks. They were not required for a long time, but recently became recommended here for public water. Those of us on well we have always had a pressure tank cause itās kinda required! The ones for public water are small, about the size of a 5 gal bucket. Contrary to what you think, they SHOULD NOT be heavy/full of water. They basically have an air filled balloon in them to absorb the pressure changes.
On point-of-use water heaters, I bought a tiny one, and put it on the hot water line for the bidet add-on to our original-equipment 1952 Eisenhower Pink American Standard toilet, as the manufacturer-supplied hot water flex line from the sink never got hot water to the bidet, as so little was used each time the toilet was used. So great - put a tee on the water supply for the toilet, attach one line to the POU-heater, and control the mix with the mix valve on the bidet. Works like a champ - nice warm water - happy wife.
But I had to run a dedicated outlet for the darn thing, as it has a plate that claims 3000 watts at 120 volts. So, I had to drill through and cut a tile. Nerve-wracking. I can plumb, I can wire, I do both for Habitat for Humanity, but ceramic tile work is one step away from voodo.
