Tonight I made myself useful (as I so often do around here) and attacked the problem of the smelly hot water. Since we were gone and our housesitter only stayed here for a limited amount of time, the hot water sat in the heater for most of the time, undisturbed, which apparently gives it an odorific attitude and it came out upon our return smelling like…well, something odd. Kind of like a wet rock, you know the kind — the ones that smell after a warm rain on a summer’s day? That sort of rock. The ones that show up to parties and everyone avoids, but nobody says anything to them, poor blokes.

So I went to drain it out of the stopcock on the bottom of the tank (don’t you just love that word — stopcock? It’s like, “Stop, cock!” Chickens beware!) and instead of water running out, I got water meandering down a grassy path or something of that nature. Clearly, it was blocked up.

Well, no time like the present to wind the entire stopcock (Halt, rooster!) out of the tank and dig out whatever was blocking it. To my chagrin, the entire hole was blocked with what looked like concrete — oh, goodie: LIME!

For those who have perfect water and don’t know about this sort of culprit, lime is a calciferous substance that leaches out of the water of places like Sheffield and, blessed with a higher-than-normal amount of limestone surrounding their local aquifers, leaves a whitish substance not unlike talcum powder on just about every surface that it touches. In hot water heaters, this builds up into tiny balls of rock and then eventually into sheets of rocky substance.

This coats the inside (especially the bottom) of the water heater, forming a layer that progressively gets thicker and harder and can lead to longer heat-up times for the water heater, reduced efficiency, and eventually the death of it as it corrodes the insides and/or fills up an appreciable amount of the space normally reserved for the water.

ANYWHO, my heater was clearly full of it and it needed to be dug out at least from the drain hole, if not more. So off I go to battle it.

Now, the water heater is still full of water, although I have turned off the water at the main shutoff and have also reduced it to lukewarm water by filling the bathtub full before doing any of this. So I’m expecting a geyser as I approach the lime-filled hole with a big F.U. screwdriver. (All handymans need at least one, preferably five, F.U. Screwdrivers. Of course, a liquid screwdriver never hurts, either.) After some digging around and poking, sure enough — I get a formidible stream of water emitting from it, dragging with it a copious amount of lime rocks, balls, particles, and sand.

This continues until the tank is empty (takes awhile, let me tell ya) and then I proceed to spend the next hour digging around in the tank with the screwdriver like some sort of mad surgeon performing a lobotomy on a rabid wildebeast and alternatively turning the water on for brief periods, flushing the effluent out and helping me to dig at it more.

This ends up with the picture that you see on the left, which can only be described as, “The Morning After”. My water heater now has a bachelor’s from the University in projectile vomiting of lime. Pity there wasn’t any margarita in there as well. (Bah-dum! Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week. Tip your waitress.)

A bit of Shop-Vac’ing and refilling of the tank later and I now have a steaming water heater frantically burning gas trying to get up to temperature for my shower. It is, if nothing else, weighing a lot less these days, due to the almost 2 gallons of lime I removed from its innards. (I’m unsure if “gallons” is the correct volumetric measurement for lime, but it works in this situation, I think.)

There’s more extensive things I could have done to it to clear out more lime, but the night is short and I have a shower to get done, so this’ll have to do for now. I think a vinegar attack will be necessary next time, and perhaps a jackhammer. ~