Hot Water!!

To the untrained eye, this piece of machinery may not look very exciting, but let me tell you, when we turned on the hot water at 11:00 last night and actually got hot water out, we were ecstatic.

I can't believe that we finally finished this dadgum thing. It started on Memorial Day weekend and finally ended last night. In all we had to: run electrical, mount the unit, cut a hole in the side of the house and vent said unit, re-run the gas line, reconfigure the plumbing, and run a drain-line.

But now it's done....well, almost.

There is one joint that I soldered that is leaking. And, apparently, a tankless hot water heater operates very differently than a tanked. When I got in the shower last night, I had good hot water for a few minutes, and then it went out. Then I turned off the cold, and it came back. Then the same thing happened to Jay. I called the Rheem people this morning, and apparently, you are supposed to set the temperature of the unit to how hot you want your shower to be (i.e. 100F), and then just take it with full hot water.

This has left me somewhat confused and wondering how it is going to affect the rest of our water-using operations. I took a shower this morning and it worked fine. But it seems that funny things start to happen when I start mixing hot and cold water. Hopefully we'll get it all figured out, but in the mean time, we do have working hot water!

I am so proud of us. And now I'm not nearly as scared about tackling the plumbing for the bathroom.