Our Exciting Evening

I look like my mom today. In many of the pictures of my mom growing up, she wore a scarf on her head. I'm not sure why, as she never wears them these days. Maybe she was trying to keep her hair out of her eyes. She worked professionally as a landscaper, and could often be found tending to her garden at home.

I, however, am not wearing a scarf because I'm doing any gardening. The sole purpose of my scarf is to cover my not-so-clean hair.

We were up late last night, trying to put up the window insulation while watching our shows. It took me almost an hour to insulate 1 window because I had so much trouble with the double-sided tape. After the first window, I figured out a trick that made pulling the back off the double-sided tape quite easy. The next 3 windows went quickly and smoothly.

At around 11:30, I was ready for bed, but I asked Roy to go down to the basement to get the Bear's clean laundry out of the dryer. It's a good thing we hadn't gotten around to it prior to that point because within a few minutes, Roy was running upstairs, saying that the entire basement was flooded. I grabbed a sweater and some shoes and ran downstairs.

Our hot water storage tank had exploded. Roy had more than slightly exaggerated and there was only water covering a small area of our basement. But the water was continuing to pour out of the storage tank at an alarming rate, and it was steaming hot. We could not figure out how to get the water to stop, so Roy called his father, who initially didn't answer, and I went to see if our neighbor was awake (we live in a condo and she's on the first floor). She has lived in the building longer than us and has the same furnace as we do, so I thought she might have some insight. She showed us how to turn the water off to both our furnace & gas-heated storage tank and also explained how the whole system works.

Our furnace has a tankless coil system which heats the water and then sends it to be stored by the gas-heated storage tank. Our neighbor has the same type of furnace, but no storage tank. Unless you are using huge amount of hot water, the storage tank itself is rather unnecessary. We already knew this from the original home inspection when we bought the condo. We just figured that since the furnace was only 4 years old and the storage tank looks quite a bit older, the previous owners kept the tank because we have a larger unit as well as two full bathrooms.

So we slept with no heat and are currently without hot water.

Someone already came to assess our needs (at 8:15 AM! Can't beat that), and he's sending over a repairman to detach our storage tank and turn our hot water back on.

So I'm waiting for him before I take a shower - hence, the scarf covering the hair. I don't do cold showers :)