After a week and a half of icy cold showers, Mr.Absinthe finally hooked up our new hot water heater and has nearly finished re-plumbing the entire house. It needed it...all the ancient plumbing in our 110 year old house was a rat's nest of improvisation by generations of do-it-yourselfers who apparently couldn't be bothered to remove old useless plumbing when they rearranged fixtures in the kitchen, or added the half bathroom...truly, the pipes in the cellar looked like something Dr.Seuss might have come up with...oh yeah, and when they ran out of elbow joints, they improvised by simply bending the copper pipe (brilliant, except for the fact that it cuts the water pressure dramatically).
The water pressure in our fixtures was awful because of all the useless bends and joins in the plumbing (along with the occasional bent copper pipe in lieu of an elbow joint). Did you know that the more elbow joints you have in your plumbing, the lower your water pressure will be? It is because there is greater friction impeding the flow of water as it rounds a bend as opposed to going straight through the pipe. Really nice plumbing (which is what we have now), has a minimum number of bends and has long straightaways. Really nice plumbing also has wide diameter pipes because the wider the diameter of the pipe, the less friction water experiences as it flows through it (we have wide diameter pipes now, but didn't before). I think with our plumbing now we could simultaneously flush both toilets while also simultaneously have a shower and run the dishwasher and washing machine, and still be able to shoot squirrels out of the trees in the backyard with our garden hose. I'm looking forward to trying it once the weather warms up...
We don't have any water in the kitchen yet, but the bathroom is now hooked up with both hot and cold water. While he was at it, Mr.Absinthe fixed the problem that had cold water coming out of the "hot" taps in the bathroom, and vice versa. Everything (plumbing, wiring, etc) in this house has been either installed up-side down and/or backwards and what is really odd is that it isn't just the work of one lone dyslexic do-it-yourselfer, because bass-akwardness can been seen in work done in the 30's through to the 90's, and because the house is on the historic register, we know who all the past owners were (and the house changed hands several times during that 60 year time period).
The hot water heater that crapped out on us was not only very old, it was also very small (only 30 gallons...most houses have 50 gallon tanks), and it was connected to the water system backwards (gee what a surprise) such that the hot water was siphoned off of the bottom of the tank and the cold water entered the top. This meant that as a person showered, the cold water entered the tank to replace the hot water being removed and then promptly sank to the bottom of the tank (because cold water is denser than hot), meaning that the shower got prematurely cold even for a dinky 30 gallon hot water tank. Only one person could shower in our house per two hour period and it was awful when we had guests over.
The water in the heater is still warming up, so not hot showers tonight, but tomorrow morning I am looking forward to experiencing a very long wonderful high-water-pressure-hot-water shower...
