TXIslander
New Member
Hot damn! The award goes to PHOG! I pushed the power button on the leak alarm and immediately the WH went “glug, glug, whoosh, pop, hiss...” I yelled down to my family to open a hot water faucet and right away the pipe out of the machine got hot. I haven’t tried every faucet yet but, but there’s hot water coming out of the first one we tried. I’m sure there’s still a crossover issue, which we’ll address, but the more immediate issue seems to be fixed. Thank you!!Are you sure the water leak alarm valve is open? You should be feeling hot coming out the pipe on the top of the water heater, even if there is a crossover somewhere else in the house. The symptom of a crossover is usually lukewarm water. The hot pipe at the top of the heater gets fully hot, it just gets diluted down to lukewarm somewhere downstream. The fact that you're not feeling any heat in that pipe at all makes me wonder if the alarm valve is closed.
If there was a pre-existing crossover, it might have gone unnoticed for a long time. Now the water alarm valve was triggered somehow by the power outage & is stuck closed. The pre-existing crossover is still there, and this allows some cold water to go into the hot pipes. Now when you draw water off the drain valve at the bottom of the water heater, there is reverse flow into the water tank, from the cold pipes in the house, into "hot" pipes, via the pre-existing crossover, then finally into the tank. Maybe? It's hard to diagnose this kind of stuff without being there.
PS The alarm was installed by the plumbers who replaced our WH a couple of years ago and we thought it just beeped like a smoke detector. Turns out it’s Z-wave technology that allows us to control the whole machine with an app and can obviously shut things down when it thinks there’s a problem. We learned a lot today.