FEBRUARY 15, 2023 – No one likes to hear one’s spouse yell from upstairs first thing in the morning, “There’s no hot water!” If you pretend not to hear, you’ll soon find yourself in . . . hot water. Yet, if you promptly acknowledge the announcement, before the day is done, you’ll be in hot water with your financial advisor.
The sad fact about a new, state of the art, energy-efficient “heat pump” water heater is that it adds nothing to the curb appeal of our aging house: you can’t even see the bright, shiny object standing next to the (year-old Super-Duper) furnace unless you fight your way to a back corner of our crowded basement. Nor will visitors—once my bubble opens to that opportunity—enter our house, gaze into the living room and exclaim, “Wow! Your living room looks so much better with a new hot water heater in the basement!” Furthermore, the shiny technology won’t increase the value of our house. Our future realtor will gain no traction during a house showing by saying, “Remember, the house is equipped with a beautiful, planet-friendly, hot water heater for which the owners got a tax credit back when Biden—remember him?—was president.”
When the chief installer gave me operating and maintenance instructions, he warned against setting the heat above 130F. “Above that temp,” he said, “you run the risk of scalding.”
I laughed out loud. “You mean,” I said, “If you have to buy a new water heater, you run the risk of scalding.” Just then, the Super-Duper furnace kicked on, drowning out the punch line.
In fairness, the installers were polite, responsive, competent and efficient. Their company specializes in water heaters. If the unexpected acquisition put me in hot water financially (Beth’s reaction, “It’s going to cost how much?” still rings in my ears), I’ve convinced myself that we didn’t get fleeced. Why am I convinced? Psychological necessity is the mother of ardent belief, especially when you’re contemplating having to take a cold shower in the middle of winter.
To lessen the scalding psychological effect of opening the spigot to our checkbook, I’ll pour myself a tall glass of ice water—and hope that our ice-dispensing refrigerator doesn’t get any funny ideas any time soon. If the cold box goes comedic, we’ll have to put a freeze on all other spending—until the stove goes, in which case, the compounding financial friction will heat things up again.
As I admired our new, computerized water heater, I imagined showing it off to some poor peasant living on the outskirts of a post-Plague, no-name, Medieval village in what is now Lithuania. Surely the ragged rustic would be impressed by heated water. But what might well blow his mind would be the canned goods on the shelving he’d have to pass at the bottom of the basement stairs. Or would it be the two Water Heaters Now! trucks parked in front of our house? On the other hand, maybe the kicker would be the invoice—the equivalent of 30 years’ worth of grain harvests on lands controlled by the local lord. No. Surely the winner would be my iPhone on which I’d show the whopping invoice to the dumfounded farmer.
But maybe I’m being presumptuous. Perhaps the peasant would simply laugh uproariously at my supreme silliness when he realized that the hot water flowing from this expensive, new-fangled machine is no different from the hot water of the cast-iron cauldron inside his thatched-roof hut.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
