A product endorsement

I have never endorsed a product on this blog, and receive no remuneration for doing so. This blog is 100% non-monetized. However, this morning as I was showering, my wife came up to tell me there was  a beeping in the basement. I quickly toweled off and got dressed and went down. Sure enough, the product to the left here, the Watchdog Water Alarm was sitting in a puddle of water by our water heater.

I had been troubled by the water heater, as the hot water coming out of the faucet seemed too hot to me – I used a meat thermometer to register it at 140 degrees when the thermostat is set at 125. I did what we all do, went to YouTube, which said that I probably had a buildups in the tank, and that I needed to flush the water heater to get rid of the debris. That should be done every year, I was told. I thought well, heck, I don’t do that every year, but I do it often, like … well, never.

At the same time, we had two leaks in our boiler room, so I called Weatherbee, the people who tend to our boiler, and while they were booked till Monday agreed to send a man over who was in the area. As it turns out, all leaks had a common source.

The Weatherbee man was checking out the water heater, as I assumed it had overheated. We finally decided to flush it, and I ran a hose to a nearby bathtub. But as we did that, water started coming up the drain in the room where the water heater was. We both had a flash of insight, and I went and flushed a nearby toilet, and sure enough, water came up the drain again. We had a backup between toilet and septic tank. The water heater, needing a flush, was OK. I needed Roto Rooter. The Weatherbee man left, and as he did so I said “Aren’t you going to leave me a bill?” No, he said. Roto Rooter will do more than enough in that department.

I called the nearest Roto, and about an hour later Jake came by, and he and I spent the rest of the day opening up our septic tank under snow, gravel and plywood. We then removed a toilet, and he ran a rotoline to the septic tank, which took more than an hour. But at a certain point, there was a kind of thump, and the drain near the water heater emptied, and we knew we had found the problem. We put it all back together. A small portion of carpet near the water heater was soaked, and I used a Shop Vac to suck it up. All is well.

I set the Watchdog Water Alarm next to our water heater in June of 2020, and then forgot about it. I know this because I wrote on it that I had put a battery in it that day. Had it not been there and beeped at us, our basement would have flooded. This $12.49 gadget saved us several thousand dollars in damage. We would not have known we had a septic tank backup in the basement for hours, and by that time, believe me we’ve been through it, the damage would have been serious.

Some products are worth every penny, and this is one.

PS: Stephers tells me that she has a new post ready to go, hopefully tomorrow. I can only think she whipped it up after reading this one, saying “Sonja Henning’s tutu! I gotta help that guy.”