Hot water or Yes, I am an Asshole
Guess who had a ten minute hot shower this morning? If you guessed me, give yourself a cookie. For those of you just joining us, there was a story a while back about how I hot water was intermittent in my apartment at best. Well, now I know why that was occuring.
You see, waaaay back when, the water just wasn't hot enough. So I turned the temperature up on the water heater. It took several tries to get the water temperature to where I wanted it. One of the times I was making my adjustments I replaced the cover. The outside of the cover was plastic, but the inside was metal. Well, when I did this, I shorted something out, got a spark and heard a pop.
Skip forward several months. In the summer the water was always the right temperature because it was over 100 degrees outside. But when winter finally came, the temperature of the water once again would not stay hot above a minute or two's use.
For those of you with keen observational and inference skills, you can probably guess what happened. For those of you aren't a cut above, I'll explain. That thing that sparked and popped so many months ago was the thermostat on the hot water heater. Apparently it worked just enough to heat some water but would then cut off because it thought the water was too hot. And therefore I had no hot water.
What's the morale of this story? Don't work on your hot water heater unless you first flip the breaker. You could short the thermostat and be in hot water...or not.