A Bit Too Close

(I'm late with this because the Internet at home went down Thursday morning and didn't come back until Friday afternoon.)

So the plumber showed up Thursday afternoon to replace the water heater. He'd actually been by on Wednesday to look at it and measure it. Out of necessity, I have a short model that's about half the height of your standard water heater, and it sits in the closet in the bathroom which I use as the linen closet.

After he drained the remaining water out of the old one (through a hose that ran out of the apartment and into the flower bed outside) and carted it out of the bathroom, he brought in the new one and unpacked it from its box. I looked at it and thought that it looked a little bigger than the old one, but I didn't say anything. But as he was putting the fixtures on it to connect it to the pipes in the bathroom closet, he started thinking the same thing.

After another measurement, he realized that the new heater was an inch too wide to fit in the closet.

Creating a Problem.

Some phone calls were made and the hope was that a heater that fit could be located, otherwise my choices would be either go with a lower-capacity tank (which I wouldn't have had a problem with) or knock out the walls (which I WOULD have had a problem with). Fortunately, a 40-gallon heater that fit was found ("They don't even make these anymore") and installed, though he had to remove the folding door on the closet to do so. This was quite the process by itself, as the bathroom door was closed and his torch (which I guess he was using to seal the pipes to the fixtures) still set off the smoke detector three times. This all took about five hours, or three hours more than it normally does.

Total cost: $700, which is at the low end of the estimates I got from five different places. (I learned my lesson from the toilet debacle.)