Sorry it’s been so long since my last post! With the start of  the new school year and all, it’s been a little hectic to say the least.

So the purpose of this post is to point out something I’m a little ashamed to admit – sometimes you need to call a pro rather than try to learn how to do it yourself.

It all began on a night like any other. After bathtime, I was taking care of some chores and noticed that some water had gathered around the base of my hot water heater in the utility room.

hot-water-heater

I have no idea how long the water had been coming out as I’m not in the basement of the house every day, but I did know that water is NOT supposed to leaking out the bottom (yeah, I’m smart like that). So a quick inspection to try and figure our where the water was coming from proved inconclusive, so it was off to my best friend Google to start doing some research and see what could be done about this little plumbing situation I found myself in.

A few searched later and I was deep in the YouTube rabbit-hole of DIY’ers showing how it’s done. From what I could tell I had a bad pressure relief valve – which as the name implies is there to release excess pressure that builds up as a result of heating water. It looks like there are two things that can happen to this little do-hickey, it can become unseated or it can break. From what I could tell mine was busted. No big deal right? According to all the DIY sites, this was a low skill challenge (perfect for me!) and the part only cost $20 as opposed to having to pay a plumber $150 house call fee plus the part. OK, I’ve taught myself remotely a lot more complex skills than just changing a valve on a hot water heater – how hard could it be? The answer might surprise you – it turns out that there are a few tools that make the job easier and faster and of course add to the overall cost of a DIY job (not to mention the time spent).

Sometimes I am in such a rush to just do a job myself and pick up some new skills that I fail to really assess the true costs – even if an online course is free there are other costs associated such as your time, tools or materials that you would have to buy to get a job done, or the hardest one to admit is that some things (like hot water heaters) simply can’t have a half-assed job done on them.

I’m not going to admit how much time I spent trying to get this valve replaced (getting it out took me all of 2 minutes, getting it in? No comment) but suffice to say that it was several days before I finally threw in the towel and called Langley Plumber and had a professional take care of the work. It literally took them 10 minutes of work – with me peering over their shoulder to see just what the heck I had been doing wrong the whole time. I honestly still can’t figure it out . Sam (the plumber) took his time to kindly explain to me what needed to be done but it seems that fixing hot water tanks is just not my thing.

Here’s my advice – try to figure out everything for yourself but weigh the costs vs benefits. If plumbing skills were something that I was able to use daily or weekly then it would make sense to invest in the tools and skills necessary to get the job done. In this case, I wouldn’t even be using the skills gained yearly.  Time is the one thing we can’t make more of, so how we invest it is important – don’t get too atached ot having to be able to do absolutely everything yourself.

Until next time!