Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Aaaaaaand ... as of 10:55 the plumbers are gone. Now I just wait for forty gallons of water to come up to showering / dishwashing temperature.

Apparently either a message was incompletely transmitted, or was communicated but not entirely believed. On the phone to a call center in Florida to get an estimate and then to order the water heater, I said my basement door was 21 inches across and asked how wide the new heater was. The short model is 21.75 inches and the tall model is 19.25 inches. The local plumbing company that the big-box chain contracted installation out to hedged their bets and sent one of each, telling the two guys in the truck that there might be a problem with fit but not being very specific. At least they did believe that the customer might actually have some idea how to use a tape measure and did send the tall heater along. Apparently not having enough vertical space is a more common problem than really narrow doorways, because at various steps in this shopping process folks wanted to convince me to get the short version.

"Wow. That's a really narrow staircase."

"Yup."

"You said you measured it?"

"Yup."

"We're gonna need the tall one."

A couple minutes later: "The hand truck won't fit. We're going to have to carry this down."

While they worked, we talked about old houses, energy prices, and the travelling salesman problem (and their frustration with trying to get their dispatcher to make more efficient assigments, to save on gasoline). And music, of course.

And apparently water pressure at the tap is influenced as much by the plumbing inside the house as by geography and the city water supply. They admired my copper pipes and how quickly the water heater tank filled, saying that they'd probably originally been galvanized steel and some previous owner had had a very expensive upgrade done. (They also talked about coming back to houses they'd just installed copper pipes in, to find the copper stolen and the basement flooded, saying that was a major reason for using PVC pipe in bad neighbourhoods. When the previous owner of this house moved out and let me stay here for really cheap rent while he tried to sell it -- before my mother bought it -- he said I was doing him as much of a favour as he was doing for me, because he feared that the house would be stripped of its copper pipes and carved woodwork if left vacant.)

Okay, I'm gonna go see whether the water is hot yet. I really need a shower.