Shop Bathroom Water Heater

 "Confine yourself to the present" - Marcus Aurelius

When you work a 12 hour shift schedule, you theoretically work half of the days in a calendar year and get half of them off.  You also wind up working an additional 80 hours more than the average 9-5 worker annually.

In practice, it never works out like that.  There are outages, sick time and coverage for unplanned events.  This year, one of my co-workers took another job, and we were short-handed through most of the summer.  Another broke a leg and needed surgery.  Two others lost family members, and had to take time off to deal with that.  I ended up covering *a lot* of those shifts.  It's been lucrative financially, but it's also been a lop-sided trade-off, from the standpoint of enjoying life and keeping up with other commitments.

Anyway, I finally managed to get a few consecutive days off of work for the first time since May. The first thing I did was try to see if I could get the wife's car's electrical glitches figured out.  I replaced the wiring harness in the rear hatch.  This fixed the dead back-up camera, but it didn't fix the fact that the dash lights go out completely from time to time.

 I'm still looking for the reason the dash in her car keeps losing power every once in a while.  No idea so far.

Also I finally got around to installing a water heater in the shop.  It's only taken nine years!  Here is a link to the post from two years ago when I finally got the bathroom finished.  The deep sink still had the issue of putting out ice-cold water in the winter months.  I kid you not, it was like dipping your hands in an icy stream to wash them off - painful!!!

About a month ago, I found a 38 gallon water heater on Facebook Marketplace for $150.  Home Depot sells it for $429.  It was bigger than I wanted or needed, but the price was right, and it had never been used.  The guy selling it was a professional plumber.  He had bought it for a job, and the job fell through, and he was stuck with a mid-size heater that nobody wanted to install.

 

So I bought a 4f.t electrical connector, some plumbing fittings and some 2x4 lumber to make a platform frame.  Then when I finally had some time off, cobbled it all together in a day.  The best part is that the cost of the water heater and all of the parts was less than Home Depot wants for the tank all by itself.  I think I'm in just over $200 for the entire project.

Below:  The base is built, the plumbing and electrical are halfway done, and the insulating blanket and pressure relief piping are in place.  The valve didn't hold, so the pitcher is there to keep water from dripping all over the platform base.  I still need to stain it.

When I turned on the breaker in the shop power panel that said "H2O heater", nothing happened.  The previous owner had something else wired to those breakers.  Fortunately the wires were there, they just needed to be connected up.  Anyway, It's not fancy, but it definitely works!