One thing we noticed when we moved to a house was that the hot water just would not last very long. In addition, the temperature of the hot water would drop quickly. When I took a shower I found myself adjusting the hot water every couple of minutes because the water would get cold. For the first year living in that house neither I or my husband thought anything was wrong. We thought that's just how water heaters worked in houses and thought we got spoiled by the hot water in apartments.

Then I watched Technology connection's video on water heaters. At first I didn't connect the dots. It wasn't until I took a shower the next day that I thought about it. I thought "hang on, if the water heater is supposed to switch to heating just the half tank when it's running out of hot water how come our hot water runs out just after a few minutes of use?"

After the shower I went down to the utility room. There i inspected the water heater. From just looking at it the thing looked pretty big with a good capacity. Then I slowly formed an idea. "Water heaters are supposed to add cold water at the bottom and take hot water at the top because hot water rises. Wouldn't it be funny if for some reason the opposite was happening?" I thought. Then I touched the pipe that was marked "cold" on the water heater and immediately realized the pipe was hot to the touch. Our pipes connecting to the water heater were reversed.

I called and scheduled an appointment with a plumber the same day. When they arrived they were flabbergasted when I explained what had happened. The plumber said they had never encountered such a thing in their entire career. They were also surprised we lived with it for an entire year without realizing something was amiss.

Anyways, that's how Technology connections helped us get our hot water issue fixed.

[–] probablynaked 2 points 11 months ago

Incredible, and amazing that you thought of checking for that!!