Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Carriage house water heater - change in plans

I talked to the plumber about installing the tankless water heater. Turns out (logically) that a tankless water heater needs a more robust flue than a regular water heater, because when it's in use it really cranks through the heat. So I realized that I don't really want to get into a long, drawn-out project with updating the flue, just to get moved into the carriage house.

Long story short: I bought a replacement water heater, a regular tank heater, and my dad and I installed it this morning. Here it is, all shiny and fresh. Note that it has a separate cutoff - which is useful, because of course I haven't replumbed the hot water yet.

I tested the hot water, and yeah, got kind of soaked. There's at least a fitting blown under the bathtub; the rest look like they might be OK, but it's hard to tell when all that water is spraying around.

But - as soon as I have that fixed, and call the gas company to get my gas turned on, I've got hot water!

In other news, I've made a lot of progress in mopping ceilings and walls. It's looking a lot better in here. Still smells like bleach, but that's a real improvement on what it smelled like two weeks ago. Ha.

And in other other news, I measured the bedroom window, just to get an idea of what it might cost to replace windows. It measures 36" x 54" - meaning it's a lot bigger window than it really looks in place - and wonder of wonders, that seems to be a quasi-standard size. I have a wooden option at Menard's for $250, and Lowe's has a vinyl insert for $150 or so. In total, there are six windows in the carriage house, and frankly, they're nothing special, so I don't feel bad about replacing them with something more modern. So I could do it with halfway decent wooden windows for $1500, or cheaper-looking vinyl for $900.

5 comments:

  1. This has nothing to do with your interests, but it entertains me a great deal when I see a Menard's store, and realize they have to be connected somehow to Pierre Menard of Kaskaskia, who probably had the biggest store on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Natchez at one point.

    So you get to keep the tankless heater for the house? Yay!

    Good luck with the rest of the carriage house plumbing and the windows--getting those fixed before it's too hot to stand would be nice.

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  2. Exactly - the tankless heater can go upstairs for the bathrooms in the big house. No purchase price pain! Also, running a flue up from the upstairs shouldn't be so difficult, if I can figure out a reasonable place to install the heater. There's actually some dead space under the attic stairs, and that's very close to one of the chimneys, so ... it might all work out. I'll have to do more investigation.

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  3. Actually, come to think of it, the attic stairs are themselves the ceiling of the blue bathroom, and right on the wall of the main bath. Which means that installing the water heater on the attic stair landing, right on the chimney, would work....

    That's kind of freaky, how well that would work, actually.

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  4. Better measure *all* the windows; our newly-built house, with aluminum windows, turns out to have no two adjacent windows exactly the same size--they differ by up to 1/2" in various combinations of dimensions, as we discovered when we were measuring for blinds.

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  5. Yeah, I did that already, of course. They're all 54" tall, but 1 36", 2 30" and 3 28.5".

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