Home Improvement Today?

All these new safety features, half are crap, not needed, and prone to fail.

 

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FWIW ... I just finished an AO Smith (50 Gal. Premium Commercial Tank) repair and am VERY dissatisfied with AO Smith. Water heater was 3 years old with light use. I called AO Smith corporate repair number and this happened .... talked to them 4 times ... all nice ladies ... but ... they try to diagnose on phone ... then they tell me warranty is 6 years with NO labor ... and YOU HAVE TO PAY POSTAGE & SHIPPING COSTS on the repair parts (that I had almost beg for the parts ) ... I paid for the delivery costs and was promised parts the next day ... over a week later, I get an email saying that a "DELIVER LABEL HAS BEEN PROCESSED" ... WTF ... still no parts received to this day.

DO THIS - TO MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER (forget the warranty unless you have a serious problem like a cracked tank).... IF your heater breaks do this (or even before it breaks) ... go to the plumbing wholesale house and get a deep socket element wrench ($7.00) ... 2 -- 4500 watt commercial elements (or proper size) are about $11.00 each and top and bottom commercial thermostat are about $40.00 for both ... and for less than $65.00 bucks you can do a complete rebuild (if necessary) ... mine only needed a top element ... but I replaced both top & bottom ... now I keep 2 extra elements and top and bottom thermostats for emergencies. Was told by wholesale house that the bottom thermostat rarely goes out. Oh, After removing the old elements, clean the rusty black goop out of the tank element threads.

JOB TIME --- Draining the tank = 30 minutes ... replacing BOTH elements = 30 minutes (with a good element socket wrench $ $7.00) ... refilling tank and purging ALL COLD & HOT outlets = 45 minutes. Don't forget to push the RED RESET BUTTON like I did ... thanks for that advice RustyGreen ... lol

The elements that I got at the wholesale house were much higher quality than OEM.

PS ... I was at Home Depot and their heaters had a longer warranty with PARTS & LABOR for 3 Years. They were either Rheem or Ruud.

FWIW .... an "element socket wrench" is worth its weight in gold and makes this job a piece of cake.

EDIT ... I was told by a plumber and the supply house that draining your tank annually and replacing the elements every 3 or 4 years will pay for itself in water heating costs water heating recovery ... IF you buy the parts wholesale and IF ... You Can Do It Yourself.


My last house had an AO Smith gas water heater that lasted over 30 years with 1 burner rebuild.

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While we are on water heaters:

When I replaced my 30 gallon electric I removed the original plastic drain valve and replaced it with a
copper pipe nipple, a brass full port ball valve and a male garden hose fitting. I keep a short length of hose tucked behind the heater and flush the sediment out into a pail every month or so.

That full port valve will really move the water & sediment and it feels solid unlike those plastic drains.

This type fitting:



I keep a cap on it when not in use just to prevent any misadventures.

 

Have you considered installing an inline sediment filter before the water heater?

 

It isn't really sediment, minerals actually.
There is a whole house filter on the incoming line.

It is interesting, when I haven't flushed the heater in a while it will make more "perking" noises. Draining about 2 gallons of water might yield perhaps only a 1/4 cup of flakes but the perking noises will go away.

 

New vs old

 

Pretty much the long & the short of it right there.

 

And so the future homeowner/next husband/whoever knows which one it is

 

Is the anti siphon cap supposed to be tight or snug?

 

Mine was leaking and I gave it a gentle snug and it stopped

 

Alrighty I finished all the flooring, the drywall for the short step-down wall, the stairs themselves, the guard rail, and patched/re-textured/primed all the walls. Time to move on to the built-in. I picked up WAAAAAAY more material than I need for this thing but hopefully that just speeds the process a bit so I don't have to make trips to the hardwood dealer.

I'm not a pro so maybe someone has seen this before. The goal is to make the left and right banks of cabinets the same size as each other (just for symmetry) but the walls flanking the pocket door aren't the same length. The wall on the right is 2 1/4" longer than the wall on the left.


What's the preferred way to deal with it? Make a 2 1/4" wider filler strip on the right side so the cabinet parts can all be constructed the same? There'd just be a wider infilled area here:


Or construct the the right side wider so it takes up the difference? If I did it that way I'd be banking on 2 1/4" being unnoticeable but the infilled areas on each side would be the same. I'm thinking a big filler strip might be the answer... but maybe there's other opinions.

 

Think I would make the one on the right a little bigger. That size with a door separating you probably won’t notice it.

 

what are you doing for that light switch?

 

Could you reframe the left side of the door? Making the door look a little smaller but centered..

 

I could do that but there isn't a ton of room to make the door smaller; it's at 2/6 at the moment because of the split-jamb and stopper to cover the edges of the door. Shrinking it more would put it around 2/4? So 28" wide. I assume that's walking the line of being too skinny, yeah?

Thought long and hard about that one. It's part of a 3-way already so I'm going to delete it creatively: cut it out and cap the Romex inside another switch box on the other side of the wall in the laundry room. The Romex is long enough to not need a splice so it works out nicely. Then add a wireless Pico remote (10-year battery) that will be recessed into the decorative panel as you walk through the door. Master switch will be near the stairs on the other side of the room as part of a wireless three-way setup to control the room lighting. I'm also adding a second Pico remote to the decorative panel that will control the gallery lighting. The master switch for that one will be hidden in the lower cabinet next to those outlets you see.

 

Agreed on just making the cabinets on the right side a little wider. If you're really ocd, you could reframe the door and move the outlet over, but I don't think it's worth the effort for 2 1/4".

 

I guess would be preference at that point, but 28”, even 24” would still be considered a standard size for an interior door. Your use and traffic through said door would be factor for me

 

What will you notice, ie bother you, more? A filler that will for sure look out of place or shelves/doors that are 1 1/8" wider then the left side? If I came and looked at the finished product I probably wouldn't notice the difference in the shelf width but I would for sure see the filler as out of place. To each there own though. lol

 

what about making the door 'tunnel' 2-1/8" wider?

it would give you a little more moving space to get to the door, making only the one cabinet face above it needing to be slightly larger


and also, you pulled measurements along the wall, but are the walls the cabinets butt up to actually square? many times one wall is at 87 degrees or so, which makes for an additional inch or more at the cabinet face, which would require a larger filler anyways. or if the walls are tapered in, you can cheat your wall-side panel down to a 1/8" facia panel that brings it back to square, but appears almost flush at the front edge.

 

Gotcha — I decided to just make that side a little bigger. I agree that a bigger fill strip would be more noticeable than 2 1/4” stretched across 4 doors. I got the left side lower carcasses finished today and I’ll do the right side lowers tomorrow and spread the width difference across them.

Making the door opening wider would more than likely expose the edges of the pocket door that need to be trimmed in. I think to do it 100% right I’d need to re frame a bit if I want to mess with the door and keep the reveal around the door the same. Unless I’m not understanding fully.

I shot a laser to the walls and I’m only reading about 1/8” to 1/4” of run-out across the 8 ft of height on the left side measured from the door edge. Closer to about 1/2” on the right side. Relative to each other it looks like the walls bow in toward each other slightly.