Burning Down the House

We've had problems with our hot water heater for quite some time. We knew the thermostat was going out, but instead of looking into what it would take to fix it, we just kept hitting the reset button whenever we needed hot water. It was very annoying when you woke up and realized that the hot water heater needed reset, but you needed to be somewhere NOW. Looking back, I'm really embarrassed that we rigged it for so long. But after a while, we stopped talking about fixing it and it just became part of our day.

Knowing our hot water heater was on the fritz, you would think that when I smelled burning plastic I would immediately check there first. Negative on that. I unplugged EVERYTHING. Smelled every outlet. Walked around the house several times to investigate the scent. I finally determined it was the furnace, which is close to the water heater. I mentioned it to Jeff and he checked out the furnace and found nothing wrong. So we just figured it was one of those weird things and stayed on alert for a few days, sniffing around to see what it was. Fast forward to Christmas Day when our water would not heat. At all. So we start thinking of how we're going to squeeze a hot water heater out of our budget while calculating how much hot water you can get from the kettle on the stove. We FINALLY decided to actually take a look at the hot water heater and found this:

This is the lower thermostat and plastic covering from our hot water heater that had apparently CAUGHT ON FIRE. The thermostat is completely gutted and you can see the plastic is melted. We are seriously lucky we didn't catch the house on fire! We think the only thing that prevented it was the fact that since we kept hitting the reset button, we didn't have the front panel on the unit. The fire burnt itself out because it didn't have any where else to go. With the panel on it, it would have immediately caught the insulation and Styrofoam and who knows what else!

So this goes to prove, delaying home improvements CAN be helpful sometimes! (or just really stupid and lucky!)

Theme song for today's post: Burning Down the House by The Talking Heads