Last night, ten p.m. My bedtime. Tamara's washing her hands. "Bobbi? You might want to check the water heater."
I did, Tam trailing after. The pilot light had gone out. It has never gone out by itself.
You can call me paranoid if you like, but having lived in old houses with old appliances, one with a coal-converted-to-gas furnace best described as "terrifying," I will not relight a mystery-failure pilot light and drift off to dreamland. That furnace, an old "octopus" large enough to climb inside, had a 30" gas-ring burner with a pilot light in the center, which exactly one (1) furnace tech in town would work on -- and in the other side of the duplex I owned at the time, the furnace had the same conversion with an even scarier blower setup, a wobbly 1930s squirrel-cage fan in the hot side instead of the external cold-side 1950s Sears job on mine. Those furnaces would come on by hissing out gas for thirty seconds or more before starting with a "wumph!" you felt more than heard. The possible failure modes were not good; the big combustion chamber was essentially a fuel-air bomb.
Last night, I shut the gas valve. This morning, I called a plumber. He or she can check it out. Maybe it's just the thermocouple that monitors the pilot light; they're designed to fail safe, shutting off the pilot valve even if the failure's in the thermocouple itself. That water heater is pushing twenty years old and if I can manage the cost, I wouldn't mind putting in a slightly larger one.
Update
6 months ago
1 comment:
We just replaced our water heater a couple months back. First, the pilot went out, so I threw in a new thermocouple and cleaned schmutz out of the pilot tube, just like I did 10 years ago...even had a spare thermocouple on the shelf for this. A week later, it started leaking. I installed that water heater 20 years ago myself, but 63-year-old me wasn't going to truck water heaters up and down the stairs. The nice young plumbers from the office across the street were more than happy to do it. And the new one has a gas valve that's cool... there's a LED across the thermocouple line that blinks every ten seconds or so to let you know the pilot is lit without having to get on the floor and look in.
One of our first rental houses had the skinniest gas water heater I've ever seen. It was only 20 gallons, so it was set to Scald mode to make enough hot water for two showers. When it would fire, the flames would briefly lick out of the bottom about six inches! That house also had the big converted furnace with the Sears blower kit. The gravity-feed ducts were left in place, so the airflow was bass-ackwards to what a normal forced-air system would be, and we had to dodge the huge ducts with the asbestos joint tape when walking through the basement.
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