Water Heater 1, Kelley 0

January 27, 2008 | By Kelley Koehler | Filed Under Repair Renovate Maintain

So the water heater went out at my rental property on Wednesday night. It’s only a 3 year old unit. As luck would have it, there’s some kind of class action suit against the manufacturers of that particular unit for installing defective thermocouples. If your serial number begins with ‘FG’ you call this number and they send you out a new manifold assembly.

Yeah, a manifold assembly. As in, what the heck is a manifold assembly? I’ll take one, please, thank you. And can you send that overnight delivery?

So we went over there to swap out the manifold assembly yesterday night. Picking out tools to take over there was fun. Do you think we need a screwdriver? How many variety of wrenches should we take? Certainly we won’t need a hammer, will we?

Just ignore that tiny voice at the back of your head saying I probably shouldn’t be tampering with appliances that combine gas and flame on a regular basis. It had to be done – my plumber flaked and I can’t leave my tenants without hot water for much longer.

Two hours later, we managed to swap out the old parts for the new. Since I’m the one with the mad water heater lighting skills, I got to lay on the cold concrete and light the pilot. And it flamed right up! And then I release the red button and poof. Flame go out.

Hold button and clicky-clicky – woo-hoo, flame!

Release button: flame go out.

Repeat for 15 minutes.

Spend 20 minutes readjusting all connections.

Spend an additional 10 minutes in clicky-flame-release-poof cycle. Give up for the night. Apologize profusely to tenants.

Today I’m advised that maybe the thermocouple isn’t *in* the pilot flame, maybe we can just push it into the flame. Ah yes. The thermocouple. As in, which part is the thermocouple again?

At least we know which tools to take over this time.

Comments

2 Responses to “Water Heater 1, Kelley 0”

Yuman on February 9th, 2008 4:55 pm

So, did you put the themocouple into the flame? Funny post.
Kelley Koehler on February 10th, 2008 11:44 am

Yes, Yuman. And then we figured out that the thermocouple adapter wasn’t screwed in all the way. The directions said to tighten only by hand, but it wasn’t fitting in very well, so we discarded directions and went straight for the wrench. Worked like a charm.

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