Replacing a Water Heater for Dummies

Note TPR valve at right

An old joke says, "How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? His lips are moving." Yes, we know, a lot of lawyers are women – so sue us (rimshot). Whatever the case, when it comes to DIY, we have a similar riddle for freelancers: "How can you tell a freelancer is lying? He says the job is 'easy.'" We caught Alecia Gibson, a.k.a. AllyG47, over at Infobarrel.com telling us that replacing a water heater is an easy job when she wrote "Water Heater Installation," and we were pretty certain she was lying about ever having done this, because the very first sentence in her article is

"Water heater installation is an easy do-it-yourself project. Anyone can do it and it only takes a few hours."

It has been our experience that nothing involving large-scale plumbing jobs is "easy," which suggests to us that Alecia may have watched a professional plumber (with an assistant) perform this activity, but she's never some close to doing it herself. In the first place, Ally doesn't know the names of the tools:

"Tongue and groove pliers, a pipe wrench and split joint [emphasis ours] pliers are good tools to use for disconnecting and reconnecting pipes"

We'd expect someone who owns the tools and has the expertise to perform the job to know the tool is "slip-joint" pliers, which are pretty much the same as tongue-and-groove pliers, anyway; at least in sizes large enough to wrangle pipes. Gibson continues with

"...you will need Teflon tape if you have copper pipes and joint compound if you have galvanized pipes..."

Ummm, Alecia, you'll probably want joint compound for your copper pipes, too; Teflon® tape is for less permanent installations. Ally then launches into her instructions, starting with -- as morons who write about unfamiliar DIY projects often do -- "pull the permit"! When she finally gets to installation (step 5, believe it or not), she explains that you must remove the old water heater, but first turn off the power source: "Turn off the electric to an electric water heater by shutting off the circuit breaker. If it is a propane heater, shut off the gas supply" Well, true, but a lot of people dumb enough to read this far in your instructions will have natural gas heaters: what about them? And then you drain the sucker: "Get a hose and hook it up to the drain valve. Place the open end of the hose outside, in a sink or over a floor drain."

Shouldn't you have told them to have the end of that hose lower than the sillcock on the heater, Alecia? Hard to do if you stick it in a sink... After it's drained, you wrestle the old heater out of the way and slide in the new one. Props to Ally for mentioning that you need to level the new heater (though chances are real good she watched the pros do just that). Whats next is her oversimplification of reconnecting everything:

"Connect the new water heater to the plumbing connections. Use Teflon tape to create a watertight seal on copper joints. A joint compound can be used on galvanized fittings."

She makes it sound so easy, doesn't she! This may well be the toughest part of the job, since reconnecting the plumbing is a lot more complicated than just sticking pipes together. But we'll let that ride for now. Finally, Gibson wants you to reconnect the heater to the power source:

"All you have left to do is reconnect the electrical wiring. If it is a gas water heater, reconnect the gas pipe and the flue."

Here's where Gibson's advice, already poor, turns dangerous: building codes everywhere prohibit the re-use of gas connectors. Instead of "reconnect the gas pipe" that line should read "install a new natural gas supply line." And we also note that Alecia never even mentions the TPR valve: did she just forget about this essential safety device?

That's why we hand out the Dumbass of the Day awards to people who just watch someone esle perform a task – or, more likely, simply read about it -- and then write long, involved articles claiming to give instructions, AllyG47, you are definitely a dumbass about this topic: stick to concert reviews, huh?

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