The Appliance Gods are After Us

 Actually, things look better than they did this morning, The irrigation installation in the back yard is no longer leaking.  The dishwasher still misbehaves now and then, but it's decided to do so only when there's nobody there who can fix it, so we just turn it off overnight and it recovers.  

Today we had a new problem pop up.  We have an agreement with a local firm to inspect our furnace once a year, and they came by today.  This should have been a glance and a wave, but - they said the furnace heat exchanger is cracked.  What?  We asked about repairs, and it turns out that repairing the heat exchanger is more intrusive and nasty than replacing the furnace, which is 18 years old.  Apparently a new furnace is just pop the old one out, and pop the new one in; while fixing the heat exchanger involves taking the whole thing apart and reassembling all the pieces.  The rep also said that 18 years is about a normal life for furnaces these days.  The bad news is that it'll cost low 5 figures; the good news is, they can do it next week.

One of the things this means is that the furnace is now dangerous - in fact, illegal - to run!  Some issue with carbon monoxide, which I didn't quite get.  But we have to turn the old furnace off until we get the new one!  It's a good thing it isn't January.  

The other thing they found when poking around the furnace in the basement is that we have a leaky hot water pipe down there!  This is not a difficult repair, but it'll mean turning all the water off, and I'm trying to do 5 loads of laundry!  The pipe repair guy says he'll have to get a new pipe and he can do the repair tomorrow, when the laundry will be done.  Phew!  There's a load in the washer now.

The pipe repair guy was totally blown away (he's youngish) to find that the leaky hot water pipe was BRASS!  In fact, the leak was at a connection between the brass pipe and a copper pipe.  The house is about 106 years old, and Jim remembers that they told us when we bought it not to drink from the hot water faucet, because brass pipes contain lead!  We'll replace the brass with a nice copper pipe, for much less than the new furnace will cost.