I found out recently that a good hot shower is worth over $600 to me...because that's what I paid...
Recently, I called the plumber. I told the guy I was calling him because my shower leaked. I pretended to be a helpless female. I knew I could actually fix that but I didn't want to admit that I didn't know how to turn off the water main. I also didn't know what all the stuff attached to the pipes in the basement was. Seemed I was just looking for information--the strong hot shower wound up being a happy unexpected result.
The plumber--let's call him Pete because frankly, I can't remember what his name was (I do know his wife had a baby in the middle of our bill negotiation)--arrived in a downpour. Each trip between his truck and the inside of the house and the inside of the basement, he got wetter and wetter. Fortunately it was a warm day.
Pete fixed the shower leak in a heartbeat -- he even had the cartridge that needed to be replaced saving me the $75/hr trip to the hardware store. Eventually, it seemed that each time he peeked his head in the front door there was either really great news or really horrible news. The time passed, the news continued. In the course of this, he discovered that a) the water main shut off was a little tiny thing that looked like it belonged in the office supply world rather than the plumbing department, and b) there was a lot of stuff in the basement he could not explain. First, he suggested we replace the shut off--I agreed since I thought it might break off when I needed to use it.
Turns out the original installation of the system was bass-ackward and included a couple different tanks which were unidentified and unidentifiable. Who knew things could be this complicated, this wrong and this expensive? He rearranged the things he could ID and at some point, he finally left. The upside was that I felt like I knew a whole bunch of stuff I hadn't known before.
A couple weeks later, I realized that water pressure had deteriorated since Pete's visit. I called him to see what he thought. He thought he needed to figure out what the stuff in the basement was. I thought that sounded reasonable. A few hours later, he said, let's just take this tank out and check the water quality and see if anything changes...then we might know what that tank is. When he pulled out this giant tank, he found it was full of what I could swear must be toxic waste. We still don't know what the tank was for--and there's another one still in place so there're opportunities for more visits with Pete, but meanwhile, the water pressure is good, the water quality is fine, the silt at the bottom of my water bottles is gone. Life is good. The really really really great upside is the hot pelting shower. I love it. A mere $638 later.
