This guy! That's right, we signed all the papers to refinance the house earlier this week, Thursday it was, and at the time I signed, the hot water heater wasn't working. I wasn't too worried though because the parts to fix it were already at the house, having arrived overnight delivery from Whirlpool.
The heater was cold twice this week when I took my morning shower. The first time I blamed it on bad luck and it relit, seemingly just as it was supposed to when I relit the pilot light. The second day I went to Lowes at lunch time to buy a new thermocouple- which they didn't have!
Seems I have a Flame Lock water heater- labeled by Whirlpool and only sold at Lowes. And Whirlpool is just settling a class-action lawsuit related to the unreliability of these machines. In the original configuration, the thermocouple apparently fails routinely and was left-hand threaded, meaning they were only available at Lowes.
So, I called Whirlpool and they sent me a complete new assembly- the sealed door with new tubes and new thermocouple, with an adapter that makes the assembly fit a normal right-hand thread thermocouple, for free except for the overnight shipping and Thursday night I installed it. Everything seemed wonderful- except that it is still not working! I even installed another thermocouple today as I couldn't make the device provide the correct readings on my multimeter this morning. Now that one isn't working either.
I've already replaced the gas valve just a few months ago when I was having problems and before I knew there were wide problems with every Flame Lock machine so I'm pretty stumped. I guess I'll call Whirlpool tomorrow and see if they can get this damm machine working properly so I can count on regular hot showers.
As I started out saying, we did finalize the re-financing of the house on Thursday, from the 21+ years we had on the old mortgage to just 15 years now. We also took out enough extra equity to pay for the windows we purchased last fall and to pay for the improvements & repairs to our kitchen and dining area. That work is done too so now there is just some cleaning up to do before everything is back to normal. Oh, I've got a bag of switches, outlets and cover plates to install too so that everything is white instead of brown or ivory.
But that's not getting done tonight...
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