Hot Water...

Four months without a post on this blog. But now the weather has warmed up and we now are in the building season. Yesterday, we had the house re-plumbed. Copper clogs too quickly with this very hard water we have. We also put in a propane hot water heater. We put it outside (which bewilders my Minnesota brain).

And so after 1,080 days without water to the kitchen, without hot water, without having a shower--we now live in the splendorous world of modern plumbing!

Yet, I felt guilty about having this fossil fuel contraption sitting outside with its only function being to keep 40 gallons of water hot 24 hours a day. This just seems silly. Wasteful. We couldn't get an "on demand" hot water heater because the pump doesn't push the water at a steady state. The prior owners had one---and that nearly burned the house down.

So I called and asked my plumber for a bid to add a Solar Hot Water Heater to this mix. He said they could quite easily set a system up; that it is quite easy to do (he's done it before).

So what is it like for us to have hot water again? Frankly, it is heavenly. Now I know why those Romans built cities next to geo-thermal areas. There is nothing like just turning the knob and having hot water flow out of the spiget. We've jumped from the Third World to the First World. And boy do we appreciate it.