Federated Handy People

This wasn’t an ordinary water heater replacement. Typically, you pick a water heater with the same specifications and energy source as the one that stopped heating water, then swap old & new without too much trouble.

In this case, decisions over the years had the old water heater under-rated for their use case.

This residential application was initially a multi-family home with separate water heaters; an up/down style duplex. In decades past, it became a one-family home. When the short water heater stopped heating, they just bypassed it and became a one-tank house.

More recently, it became a two-family duplex with 5⁺ residents but only had one overworked heater because of the bypass plumbing. (pro-tip: if you have an old water heater, 15⁺ years or just older than the warranty and it’s still working fine, replace it soon because not all water heaters are in stock)

Four weeks after the old water heater broke and would only make one half a hot shower every two hours, our Rheem Richmond tank finally arrived for installation. That was a lot of cold showers for both families!

In order to be responsible, we had to upgrade the capacity of the tank, both in the BTUH specification and the Gallon capacity. The old was 34,000 BTU/hour and 40 Gallons. The new tank is 60,000 BTU/hour with 50 Gallons of ready hot water. Even while flowing at 61 gallons per hour, you’ll get bathwater out of it at all times.

However, with upgrades in capacity, there are other things to think about. The old tank only had a 3-inch single-wall flue pipe going into the chimney. This upgraded tank required a 4-inch double-wall flue pipe; that means surgically chiseling into the existing chimney hoping the last guy wasn’t a hack at his craftsmanship, then mortaring back in the new pipe to seal off any chimney gas from reentering the basement space.

The last plumber decided to put the makeup-water supply for the house’s boiler on the same line of input water as the water heater, so that had to be dealt with also.

All the shut-off valves were stiff and sketchy, so can’t be reused. The plumber didn’t use Brass Unions to connect the water supply lines to the tank, so the reuse of old fittings is too costly.

No matter what a “last guy” did, there’s always a better way to do it now. We did a lot of little things to make the new better than the old.

Before

Top view

3-inch flue with unservicable water supply connections.

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After

Top to Bottom view

Heat protected hot water pipe connection, easy access ball valves for cut-off, oversized flex connector for gas to water heater.

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This particular job went very well, maybe because as much planning time went into it as labor time did.