We recently added an addition on to our house. The addition is a fully independent living space, with kitchen, laundry and bathroom. It was built by a (supposedly) licensed contractor and his subs. Soon after it was completed, we had a problem with the water flow out of the kitchen faucet. I took the aerator off, and it was filled with tiny pieces of grit. I cleaned it out, and everything was fine.
For awhile.
A week or so later, the same thing happened.
Then, the washer stopped filling.
I thought this was all very weird, since the main house had none of these issues, and the water supplies are tied together. When the washer stopped filling, I took off the hoses, and found that the inlet screen on the hot water side was completely clogged with a whitish-yellow crystalline sand. Only the hot water side. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that the water heater must have been installed backwards. This would mean that the outlet was picking up water from the bottom of the tank, and (presumably) sediment from the anode rod and hard water particles. I inspected the water heater, and no, the inlet water (the one with the shutoff handle) was indeed connected to the cold water side of the tank.
So much for that idea.
But, it had to be something with the water heater.
I did a little experiment, which lead to the solution:
I turned the hot water on, and felt the pipes. The one connected to the cold water side got hot!
This meant that the connections to the water heater were wrong in the wall. I shut off the water to the addition, cut the pipes, put in a new shut-off valve, and cross-connected them to the water heater. After letting the water run for a bit to blow out any residual crud, I cleaned all the filters and put everything back together. Now, pipe coming out of the hot side gets hot (and, the water in the house is much hotter). It remains to be seen if this fixes the clogging problem, but I think it will. So much for “Master Plumbers.”
