Water Heater
Remember, this house is a fixer upper. This includes a water heater that was small (30 gallons?) and at least 10 years past it's life expectancy. So, we set out this weekend to get a new water heater! James had looked at prices, sizes, and energy star qualifications and basically had the water heater picked out. We're looking to get a 50-gallon (house size of 2-4 people), gas powered, energy star qualified water heater.
We went to Lowe's and they didn't have it in stock! So, we drove over to Home Cheapo (Home Depot to some) to see if they had it in stock. They did, but it was about 30 feet off the ground up on the 3rd tier of shelves so we couldn't get it down ourselves. We asked the customer service guy to get it down for us. He then tried to convince us we should probably just get the 60-gallon water heater. It was only $100 more! Of course, we knew that he meant that the 60-gallon one is sitting right in front of us and he wouldn't have to get the lift machine out and go up to get the other water heater. I saw that a 60 gallon water heater is for a household of 5+ people and said to the guy, "There's no way we'll ever have 5 people in our household!" So, we forced this poor guy to do his job and go up and get the water heater! Hooray! We have a new water heater with a 12 year life expectancy. But, James says if you flush it out every year and replace some part every few years, you can increase the life expectancy. Thank you James!
Water Softener
One of the big differences between living at my condo in Mountain View and living in Santa Clara will be water quality. In Mountain View, we got delicious, sparkling, fresh, clean Hetch Hetchy water. It tastes like you're drinking directly from a mountain spring. In Santa Clara, we get cloudy, minerally, fizzy well water. It tastes like you're drinking directly from a piece of sulphur. Plus, the minerals leave all kinds of nasty deposits on your dishes, glasses, bathroom fixtures and tile. What this means is that we need to buy a water softener and a water filtration system for the drinking water. There's a softener for "hard water" and "very hard water". We bought a test kit then remembered that we'd turned off the water in the house! If we turn it on, there's a chance of flooding. Fortunately, the neighbor is super friendly and gave us a gallon of his tap water to test. The results were not surprising-very hard water. So, we'll buy the softener for the very hard water.
We're hoping to get plumbing done this week or next and then on to electrical!
Monday, November 9, 2009
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