Water heater mishap. Is yours next? Installing a water heater right.
Everyday in the United states there are an average of 100,000 water heaters installed. Most go into the homes and are installed by a quality plumbing company. But a whopping 40% of them are installed by the home owners or their Uncle Bob's handy work.
At Desert Sun Home Inspections I had run into a few water heaters recently that were not installed to code and were in a situation that could have caused an injury if you wanted to shut off the gas to the unit and there was a fire with the unit at the time.
Lets take a look at a couple of water heaters that don't make the grade. Both were installed between 1996 and 2008.
The first was a water heater that was in a closet inside a storage room off the main bedroom.
Here we have a heater that has no easy access to the gas shut off to the unit.
Also there was no drip leg for the gas supply for the unit.
Remember when installing water heaters, the water heater has a data plate or sticker on it. This will tell you when the unit was built by the manufacturer but not when the unit was installed in the home. But in most cases the data plate will tell you within a year of the unit being installed in the home. So when in doubt. Look at the data plate.
Here we have another unit that is even worse than the first unit. This one you would have to blindly reach around the unit and find the gas shut off without being able to see the shut off.
Not a good thing when wanting to get the gas shut off for any reason.
And the infamous Drip leg is missing as well.
In both cases the owner of the homes did say the water heaters were installed by licensed plumbers.
Really. They do have to install by the codes when changing out water heaters and furnaces.
But many simply ignore the codes knowing that if a "permit" is not pulled " then it would not be inspected by a mechanical inspector.
Have a great day every one.
Comments(22)